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Walter Presents – International

By Gün Akyuz 28-03-2024

Curated streaming service Walter Presents is prospecting for its next crop of non-English-language dramas with opportunities on the table for prebuys as well as acquisitions.

 

Walter Iuzzolino

Arguably an early pioneer of the now mainstream trend for non-English language drama, curated streaming service Walter Presents is holding its own against far larger rivals like Netflix by staying ahead of the game with a human touch and an eye on new markets.

Conceived as a curated service of subtitled non-English-language drama in an era when such content was considered niche and bordering on the elitist, Walter Presents is now its eighth year of operations and attracts sizeable volumes of traffic in core markets such as the UK. While not disclosing actual figures, viewing levels are in the tens of millions of streams every year in the UK alone, says Walter Presents co-founder Walter Iuzzolino.

Launched in January 2016 by Iuzzolino together with Jo McGrath and Jason Thorp, Walter Presents is currently available in the UK as a partnership with Channel 4 and more recently arrived on S4C for Welsh viewers. Internationally, it’s available in the US in partnership with PBS via the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel and its digital PBS Passport platform, as well as on Comcast Xfinity X1 and the Roku Channel. It recently also launched with PBS Masterpiece in Canada. It is also present in Australia in partnership with Foxtel and streaming service Binge and in New Zealand in partnership with TVNZ. Elsewhere, it recently launched to Flemish viewers on Medialaan’s new digital channel StreamZ, and in Russia on SVoD service Start, and has previously had forays into Scandinavia and Italy.

Reflecting on where the streaming service currently stands in a radically changed landscape, Iuzzolino, who also wears a producer’s hat through the prodco Eagle Eye Drama (Hotel Portofino, Professor T), co-founded with McGrath, says the market for non-English-language drama couldn’t be more different.

If BBC 4 kickstarted the appetite for foreign-language subtitled drama in the UK with French crime drama Spiral and Scandi hits The Killing and The Bridge, it was Walter Presents that took the plunge by launching an entire channel around that early proof of concept.

Spanish crime drama The Drought was a hit in 2023

Walter Presents first broke new ground with German coming of age, East meets West drama Deutschland 83 from RTL as its launch title. “When we started, no one had an inkling that the world of international drama would go beyond Scandinavia, and maybe France. Those were the accepted genres that mainstream UK and US audiences were going for,” says Iuzzolino.

The drama’s blend of genres made it “more nuanced and sophisticated and interesting than a Cold War drama, and we chose it because we thought it would send a different signal,” he says. Other early choices included French political thriller Spin, set in the world of political spin doctors; Spanish female prison drama Locked Up, tapping the country ahead of Netflix’s own move into Spanish drama with its hit Casa de Papel; and Polish drama The Border from HBO Europe.

Fast forward and the service has launched titles from across mainland Europe and the Nordics, including Italy, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic and Bulgaria, and Latin America.

“We’re now seven years in and the world truly is our oyster,” says Iuzzolino. “UK audiences have accepted that the world of international drama doesn’t need a label anymore. The viewer is ready to watch a Polish drama or an Italian drama. It doesn’t matter. You’re watching international subtitled pieces, and you embrace and love the different tones because every country has something excellent to offer.”

The other seismic change now driving Walter Presents and other streamers is the sheer choice of quality drama available. “It feels like the world has really opened up, and most countries are producing, not for an international audience, but in the knowledge that if the calibre of their production is high enough, it will transcend geographical and cultural barriers and find a global audience. This is a great stimulant for writers, actors, producers and, frankly, for channels if you’re a commissioning editor and/or you’re the head of fiction,” Iuzzolino says.

Walter Presents A French Case

“The experience we have through Walter Presents and what we’ve been doing with international producers and broadcasters, where we acquire and licence their programming, is invaluable because the international scene has always been less fortunate in terms of the amount of funding available. They’ve always had to contend with less, so they perfected the art of making really great premium television for not a lot of money, whereas the Anglo-American sphere has always had the blessing and the privilege that the English language means that these productions tend to travel all over the world and attract a global audience. But with that has also come significant inflation and costs associated with it.”

Iuzzolino says that in the current climate of cutbacks in funding of original drama by broadcasters or streamers, the model is now far closer to that of independent cinema, where funding comes from a large patchwork of sources, including distributors, who are investing and spreading their bets across the world, and where copro alliances between broadcasters are on the rise. “It means you get a Bulgarian drama via a French distributor or your German friends will deliver you an absolutely stunning Spanish romantic telenovela. That’s interesting, because it means the texture of the catalogues of material available now are really multifaceted,” he observes.

In the post-Peak TV era for the scripted industry, he advises: “All of us need to learn to operate on slightly different parameters. But I also think that creativity is ideal for that because creativity always finds a way around. The fundamental lesson for me and my colleagues at Walter Presents has been the experience because international producers are still delivering exceptional programming in quite complex circumstances.”

In the UK, Walter Presents offers between 350 to 400 hours of subtitled foreign-language drama, renewed annually, while it’s as much as 500 in the US.

In the UK, its top 10 series of the 2023-24 season currently range from Scandi crime drama Reindeer Mafia, French crime Astrid: Murder in Paris and Spanish crime drama The Drought, to Belgian courtroom drama The Twelve, French drama A French Case; Dutch drama The Adulterer and Italian Murder mystery Don’t Leave Me.

Walter Presents implemented three criteria to guide its drama selections: mainstream, high quality and critically acclaimed, with all three still guiding it today, says Iuzzolino.

Dramas had to be big, mainstream series in their country of origin. “It spoke to our desire to for it to be a mainstream commercially viable, non-niche, non-elitist service,” says Iuzzolino.

They needed to be premium pieces with a high calibre of writing, acting and directing. This helped to “dispel the idea that outside of the UK and the US, everybody makes slightly dodgy or slightly different drama. It wasn’t true. A drama can be lovely and beautiful, regardless of the size of the budgets. What you need is great writing, a fantastic director of photography and great actors,” says Iuzzolino. The third requirement was that drama needed to be recognised at either a local national level or at international festivals, and be critically acclaimed.

Also indicative of the shift in the quality of drama is that whereas early on Iuzzolino watched between 20 and 30 programmes to select one, today’s challenge is that one in every three is a potential candidate. “Most of what I watch is really high quality so, if anything, that curation filter becomes stronger because I can’t launch a show a day,” he says.

A young autistic girl helps the Parisian police solve intractable crimes in Astrid

While this is partly down to budgetary constrains, Walter Presents has always been about quality not quantity, he continues. “In an ecosystem where we tend to launch about 350-400 hours a year in the UK, you will really want to pay attention to what those hours are, and it’s made my job harder and more exciting at the same time.”

Taking Walter Presents’ UK service as an example, Iuzzolino says its audiences have become very broad and diverse. As well as attracting a core older-skewing, more upmarket audience for self-contained, procedural crime dramas, “more than ever, our audiences are now really broad in terms of age range, taste palette and urban metropolitan versus non-urban. We really embrace a big mainstream spectrum.”

Another change is that viewers often reach out via social media asking for new recommendations based on what they’ve just seen “so you forever try to configure and stretch their interests and taste palate,” he says.

As a curated service, 75% of Walter Presents selections will be around what the audience wants, which sustains the service. However, the remaining 25% will be selected to “break the mould,” says Iuzzolino, citing choices like Italian political drama Esterno Notte (Exterior Night) on the murder of Italian premier Aldo Moro, which wouldn’t generate huge streaming numbers. “However, it would be a cultural crime not to bring that show to a UK audience, so you balance it out so that your slate is diverse and rich enough to satisfy everyone,” he says.

Viewers can expect to see approximately four new series per month on the service. “Anything above that means you start to disengage because the volume is too great,” says Iuzzolino. “Sometimes when I go on big streamers and see these enormous amounts of carousels I think, ‘How am I going to ever even cope with that amount?’ We’ve found a good ecosystem in terms of the volume and consumption. The appetite is there but I think it’s fair to leave people wanting more than to overdo it.”

As well as acquisitions, the service engages in pre-buys. One is Norwegian drama Witch Hunt from Miso Film, about a whistleblower at a big accounting firm, which Walter Presents acquired at the script stage via FremantleMedia. Another two are in pre-production with broadcasters attached, but as-yet undisclosed.

“Nearly everything we do now is to find like-minded channels,” says Iuzzolino of the process of acquiring and prebuying. “Projects need to be an original for their territory, so therefore they contribute a bit more. but it’s not the old-fashioned Euro-pudding, where you put in an actor from a [participating] country.”

Popular genres for Walter Presents include crime, psychological drama, family sagas and political thrillers, and certain genres definitely travel better than others, notes Iuzzolino. “The one thing we consistently find more challenging is comedy, because every country has a slightly different sense of what makes you giggle and makes you laugh.” Another tricky area for Walter Presents is horror.

So far the service has not tested out K-drama, preferring to concede that to Netflix, given its dominance and success in that space. “It’s more about what you’ve constructed tonally as a brand and you don’t try to overdo it,” says Iuzzolino.

Walter Presents is continuously hunting for its next slate of shows, with Iuzzolino observing that the task has become harder “because there is almost no country that isn’t already out there” as well as the pressures of competing platforms.

With Walter Presents’ schedule planned up to two years in advance, Iuzzolino says that although trends are hard to spot, for 2024 and 2025 there won’t be “a flight from darkness, but there is a desire, in even in the crime space, for something that is more comforting and more comfortable right now.”

A case in point is one of its highest streaming shows ever, French crime drama Astrid, in which a young autistic girl helps the Parisian police solve intractable crimes. “It’s dark and colourful and twisted, but it’s also warm and funny. And it’s about acceptance, and neuro divergence and the ability to develop tolerance and understanding of others,” he observes, and it’s a fitting hit that sums up a service like Walter Presents.


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