Drama was king this week in Cannes as factual players look for ways to grow that don’t include innovative break-out hits. Clive Whittingham reports.

A year that started with the factual industry being told it was in the midst of a ‘creative crisis’ as far as content was concerned is coming to a close with little appetite for change, or at least few ideas on how to bring it about.

Rob Sharenow, executive VP and general manager of Lifetime, told the industry ^[1] in January that it was a “horrible time” for non-fiction, with original, innovative ideas now coming entirely in the scripted genre.

And if you walked around Cannes this week, some 10 months later, you’d have to conclude that his warning has fallen on deaf ears. Save for The Island with Bear Grylls – a Shine format for Channel 4 in the UK – almost all the publicity and buzz was around drama, with some shiny-floor shows thrown in for good measure.

This summer’s big attempt at an innovative, breakthrough unscripted hit fell flat, in the US at least, with John De Mol’s much-talked-about Utopia series – where a group of people are left in a wilderness for a year and forced to forge their own society – reduced to one airing a week by Fox after poor ratings ^[2].

The main factual players in the US continue to make headlines and, in most cases, go from strength to strength, but the headlines are rarely about an innovative piece of factual content they’ve commissioned.

Discovery, for example, has been on an acquisitions spree, headlined by a full buy-out of Eurosport ^[3] and the joint-venture acquisition of production and distribution giant All3Media ^[4] with Liberty Global for £550m (US$930m). A+E Networks launched an international arm this week to distribute and finance high-end scripted series ^[5], while Scripps Networks Interactive debuted its new in-house programme distribution arm ^[6] in Cannes after using third parties such as Passion Distribution to shop its content for the past few years.

Nat Geo is bedding down under the guidance of new CEO Courteney Monroe following the departure of David Lyle ^[7] and president Howard T Owens ^[8] earlier this year.

But there are few stories about break-out unscripted and factual hits of the scale of HBO’s Game of Thrones or AMC’s Breaking Bad. The innovative, eye-catching, reputation-building stuff is still all in drama. The programming from the factual players that does make headlines is either the continued growth of the factual drama genre – A+E launched Sons of Liberty for international distribution at this market – or the live space, where Discovery is preparing another high-wire act with daredevil Nik Wallenda crossing the Chicago skyline blindfolded on November 2.

One interesting thing to watch for in 2015 is whether a ‘new reality’ can pick up a flagging area of content and make it trendy again, or whether we’re simply going to see much more constructed reality shows set in pawn shops, swamps and dance studios spread around the world as US cable channels launch internationally. A local version of Dance Moms is coming to the UK, and Pawn Stars is already there. But how will European audiences take to such US-style programming, if it is indeed to be produced in a similar way?

In the UK, a trailer for a documentary about photographer Annie Leibovitz edited to make it look as though the Queen had stormed out of a shoot cost BBC1 controller Peter Fincham his job in 2007. In the US, such techniques are considered the norm.

Heather Jones, VP of programming at A+E Networks UK, has a unique perspective, with her channel commissioning ob-docs in the UK while taking the more structured US shows such as Pawn Stars and Storage Wars.

“Ob-docs are all about the casting,” says Jones. “The US has an extraordinary reputation for casting and the Brits are still learning from them. On the formatted factual entertainment side, the broad difference between the US and the UK is we produce things much more upfront. We plan where the drama is going to come from.

“We’re casting for conflict, a hero, a villain, somebody you want to punch and somebody you want to sleep with – if you have those ingredients you can plan where the drama is going to be. In the US, it seems a lot of stuff is left for the edit.”

Jones says the ‘Frankenbite” – where producers collect words or clips recorded at different times and string them together – is common in US reality shows but would struggle to enter UK television. “We’re much more rigorous in the UK. The UK audience won’t buy it, I don’t think producers will do it and broadcasters won’t want it,” she says.

Another question is where the rapid consolidation of the industry leaves the mid-sized distributors. Paul Heaney, formerly CEO of Cineflix Rights and founder of TCB Media Rights, told C21 earlier this year the independent sales houses were still capable of giving the big boys a “a bloody nose ^[9].” But, he added, the moves by A+E and Scripps to hold on to and sell as much of their own content as possible is typical of broadcaster behaviour at the moment and leaves less content for the independents. How much will they be squeezed in 2015 and will they survive long-term without their own in-house production arms guaranteeing content?

At the moment it seems the main factual players are sticking to what they know content-wise, waiting for the cycle to turn back unscripted’s way and growing through mergers and acquisitions, international channel roll-outs and programme sales. The BBC came back with a slew of blue-chip natural history commissions ^[10] this week, including projects with David Attenborough. Such programmes were believed to have been under threat following the end of the pubcaster’s coproduction agreement with Discovery. So the factual purists do have that to hold on to, at least.

Wouldn’t it be nice to walk down La Croisette in six months’ time and hear everybody at Mipdoc talking about the powerful, creative resurgence of factual content, rather than simply the growing power of the companies at the top of the genre? We still await our Game of Thrones moment.