Blurring the language lines

By Michael Pickard 27-01-2012

As attendees arrive home from Natpe 2012, Michael Pickard looks back at how drama fared during this week’s market in Miami.

One of the main lessons to be drawn from Natpe this week in the drama space was that the lines between English- and Spanish-language content producers and broadcasters are becoming increasingly blurred.

Venezuela’s Cisneros Group of Companies (CGC) is moving into original English programming that will air on its US partner Univision or cable networks, and plans to produce a comedy in the style of Desperate Housewives. CGC is also aiming to develop English-language scripted web content.

Meanwhile, Univision, which ranks as one of the biggest networks on US television, told delegates it will begin to target English-speaking audiences by adding subtitles to some of its biggest shows, beginning with telenovela El Talismán, coproduced with Venevision.

Mad Men producer Lionsgate and Mexican media group Televisa have partnered on a long-term programming and development venture to create English-language content for US broadcast and cable networks.

The move comes on the back of their movie joint venture Pantelion Films, which launched in 2010, and the new television arm will focus on developing between six and eight scripted and unscripted original projects each year, as well as format adaptations of Televisa’s vast telenovela library.

Projects already underway include From Prada to Nada, Pantelion’s debut film that is being turned into a comedy series; Badlands, a scripted drama at ABC made in coproduction with ABC Studios and based on Televisa’s telenovela Soy Ty Duena; Terminales for ABC Family; and Teresa, based on another telenovela.

Televisa has also linked up with Sony Pictures Television (SPT) in an exclusive first-look, coproduction deal for scripted and telenovela formats, and won a commission from Nickelodeon in the US for an adaptation of the telenovela Reach for a Star (aka Alcanzar una Estrella). The show will air on Nick at Nite and is produced in association with SPT.

Former Two and a Half Men star Charlie Sheen grabbed attention on Monday night at a party hosted by Debmar-Mercury to promote the actor’s new series Anger Management, which is produced by Lionsgate and will debut on FX this summer.

And the show has already found a home in Latin America after a raft of sales were completed by distributor Lionsgate-TISA International (Television Internacional Sur America).

Meanwhile, there will be new opportunities for Spanish-language drama in the US after Fox International Channels and Colombia’s RCN Television Group unveiled MundoFox, a new channel targeting the US Hispanic market.

Content for the network will be harvested from RCN, the home of the original Ugly Betty series Betty La Fea; Fox’s US slate; and additional third-party distributors. Shine Group, whose hits include Merlin and The Hour, will be producing MundoFox’s first original Spanish-language content.

While the deals came in thick and fast, Natpe’s line-up of panels also provided food for thought for those sitting in the audience.

Fresh from announcing its first pilot pick-up from one of the big four US networks, after ABC greenlit 666 Park Avenue, Alloy Entertainment CEO Leslie Morgenstein told delegates at the market that the company is moving away from the fantasy and supernatural genre it is best known for, thanks to series such as The Vampire Diaries on The CW.

Instead, Alloy will focus on “grounded reality” series in the same vein as its hit show Gossip Girl, which is now in its fifth season on The CW.

“There was a big vampire craze in the 1990s that was the impetus for The Vampire Diaries,” says Morgenstein. “It’s the romance of forbidden love and it seems to be one of those evergreen themes content creators can go back to again and again.

“We’re definitely talking about grounded realities. In our development process we are moving away from fantasy and supernatural and back toward grounded properties like Gossip Girl, which were leading the way 10 years ago.”

Broadcasters can expect to see new dramas coming from NBCUniversal’s (NBCU) worldwide stable of prodcos after Jeff Shell, president of NBCU International, signaled his intention to create more localised content. “We have a great production base with a number of different labels that produce programming outside the US, like Downton Abbey (the period drama created by NBCU’s UK subsidiary Carnival Films),” he said during a panel session with NBC Broadcasting chairman Ted Harbert. “Shows are not just going to come from the US anymore.”

Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos shared his thoughts about the company’s original programming strategy ahead of the February 6 launch of its first exclusive drama series, Lilyhammer. House of Cards will follow towards the end of this year, with two more projects in development for mid-2013. The platform is also resurrecting Fox series Arrested Development for a fourth season.

Sarandos said Netflix’s original content plans evolved as rival companies began to launch their own VoD platforms, forcing the company to find a way to stand out from the growing crowd.

He said: “Over the next few years, people will try to co-opt the benefits of our business and you’re seeing it today with HBO Go and other TV Everywhere models, so increasingly exclusive content may be an important differentiator.”

Speaking about the decision to pick mob drama Lilyhammer as its first original project, Sarandos added: “One-hour serialised dramas are very addictive projects that bring people incredible joy. They’re also economically challenged on network and cable television, with the expensive writing and everything else that goes into it.

“Broadcasters and cable operators are probably not going to be going as deep into serialisation as we would like for us to have a healthy content model, so one way is to say that if we need to develop that muscle – because only HBO, Showtime and Starz are going to be producing those shows and they don’t want to sell to us – maybe that’s a muscle we should develop on our own.”

With Twitter and Facebook comments now having a big say about the success or failure of many shows, social media and its impact on content was a major focus for Natpe panels.

And while speakers unanimously urged broadcasters and producers to get to grips with these new means of communicating with viewers, it was Zander Lurie, senior VP of strategic development at CBS Corporation, who reminded everyone that the story is still king. “The ‘content first’ saying still holds true,” he said. “It starts with storytelling. If you don’t have a great story with compelling characters that make you laugh or cry, you’re not going to get the consumer’s attention or the advertiser’s money.”