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Two new Australian children’s TV series have completed their funding, with major US and UK partners CBBC and NBCUniversal (NBCU) now attached.
The Worst Year of My Life – Again is a live-action comedy-drama series for Aussie pubcaster ABC, with UK channel CBBC onboard for UK rights and Melbourne’s Australian Children’s TV Foundation (ACTF) attached for international distribution.
The show’s producers are Ross Allsop (The Elephant Princess, Rush) and Bernadette O’Mahony, head of development and production at ACTF, with work going through Worst Year Productions.
Worst Year follows a boy who goes to bed on the eve of his 15th birthday and wakes up 12 months earlier, having to live the worst year of his life again. The writing team includes Mark Brotherhood (Hollyoaks), Brendan Luno (Snake Tales) and Sam Carroll (Snake Tales).
ACTF is also attached to the second new Aussie kids’ series, The Lost Boys, as domestic distributor, while NBCU has international distribution.
The show, from Matchbox Productions for ABC, follows four kids who get lost in a forest and return home to discover they’re in an alternative world where they were never born. The drama will also have a major online dimension.
Michael McMahon (The Slap) and Tony Ayres (The Slap) are the producers, while the writing team includes Craig Irvin, Rhys Graham, Roger Monk, Elise McCredie, Polly Staniford and Shanti Gudgeon.
Both new shows have received funding from Screen Australia as part of the A$20m (US$21m) it invested in local content last month. Other kids’ shows to benefit from that funding round included toon Get Ace and live-action series Sam Fox: Extreme Adventures, as reported by C21.
Other new shows on ACTF’s slate for Mipcom include Bushwhacked!, a 13x24′ factual entertainment series. North One Television is producing the show, which explores aboriginal Australia, for ABC3 and NITV.
