TCB Picks Up Two Prime-Time Shows to Headline MIPTV Slate

TCB Media Rights is heading to MIPTV with 36 new titles and 220 hours of content, including the prime-time series Banged Up (working title) and The House of Extraordinary People, with additional BriteSpark Films properties also highlighted.

Banged Up (w/t), a BriteSpark offering, follows eight troubled U.K. teenagers to Florida, where they are put through an incarceration program for youth offenders. BriteSpark’s co-founder and executive producer, Nick Godwin, said: “It’s never been more important to look at new ways of keeping at-risk youngsters out of prison and out of the cemetery.”

Hey Sonny Films’ The House of Extraordinary People, which aired on the U.K.’s Channel 5 in March, is a three-part documentary series that sees nine individuals from across the world live together for ten days, sharing their experiences and challenging public prejudices. The show is also available as a format.

Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords—all three seasons of which have been acquired by RTL Netherlands—is another BriteSpark offering from TCB that will be available at MIPTV this year. Originally commissioned by Channel 5, the show shines a spotlight on the housing crisis in the U.K. BriteSpark’s Massive Engineering Mistakes (10×1 hour), produced in association with TCB for Science Channel and Quest, remembers construction disasters from around the world. It was recently acquired by Discovery Science in the U.S.; Discovery and Odisea in Spain; Discovery U.K.; Viasat for CEE and the Nordics; and Sky TV in New Zealand.

Paul Heaney, founder and CEO of TCB Media, said: “There are many ways to try and cut through all of the other competing content out there, as a platform for the consumer or as TCB selling stuff to the market. The team at TCB definitely favor the noisy option; we like shows that are pragmatic and commercial and go for the ratings jugulars. We hope our absurdly diverse slate for this half of 2019 will give us a long tail of interested buyers and returning series.”