What’s in the script for 2012?

By Michael Pickard 13-01-2012

From crime and nostalgia to fantasy and fairytales, the drama space in 2011 had its fair share of hits and misses, surprises and disappointments.

US networks NBC and ABC took everyone by surprise with the success of Grimm and Once Upon A Time respectively. However, they had less joy with Pan Am (ABC) and The Playboy Club (NBC), which both failed to live up to the hype brought about by their 1960s settings, which led to inevitable comparisions with cablenet AMC’s Mad Men.

That Mad Men wasn’t on air for the whole calendar year yet still won the Emmy for outstanding drama shouldn’t take anything away from the rest of the field, with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire continuing to win plaudits and its stablemate Game of Thrones bringing in audiences worldwide. A second season will air this year.

Slow-burning Danish crime thriller The Killing took the international market by storm while its US remake has been renewed for a second season by AMC.

Another crime series, French drama Braquo, drew comparisons with The Wire while Australian series The Slap also won acclaim.

And so into 2012, the year when our television screens (or mobile phones, laptops and tablets) will feel heavy under the weight of the number of international coproductions coming to air.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, two huge productions will battle for viewers. From the pen of Oscar winner and Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes comes the simply titled Titanic, which follows the ship’s story from dockyard to iceberg. Viewers in the UK caught their first glimpse of the trailer when it was aired following the Downton Abbey Christmas special on terrestrial network ITV1 last month.

Taking a different approach is Titanic: Blood and Steel, which focuses on the ship’s construction and its owner. The series is a coproduction from Italy’s De Angelis Group, Italian public broadcaster Rai TV, Los Angeles-based 3 Arts, the UK’s Artists Studio, Marathon Group (France) and Tandem Communication (Germany).

Parade’s End, the Mammoth Screen-produced series for the BBC and HBO, will air later this year, with pre-sales already taking the period drama written by Sir Tom Stoppard from Ford Madox Ford’s novel to Australia.

French/Canadian copro Transporter, based on the film franchise that starred Jason Statham, is also set to hit our screens. France’s Atlantique Productions, QVF in Canada, RTL (Germany), M6 (France), HBO/Cinemax (US), Astral Television/The Movie Network and Corus Entertainment/Movie Central (both Canada) are all involved, with pre-sales made to territories including Australia and Russia.

Another copro, this time from Sony Pictures Television and Entertainment One, is The Firm, set 10 years after John Grisham’s book and the film of the same name.

The show debuted on US network NBC on Sunday (January 8), though to a somewhat lukewarm reception from critics. David Hinckley, writing in the New York Daily News, believes the show initially struggles to escape the shadow of the movie, but says the show does “plant the seed for a solid lawyer/thriller adventure tale.”

In the US, 2012 will be the year the big networks throw caution to the wind and fight back against the slew of cablenets commissioning original series and stealing their audiences, according to Tim Malloy at The Wrap. Malloy writes: “Notably, many of the biggest risks are on networks rather than cable, the normal domain of challenging TV. The less networks have to lose, the more risks they are willing to take.”

NBC will provide a dash of Hollywood in the form of Steven Spielberg, whose musical drama Smash, set behind the scenes of a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe, promises plenty of razzle dazzle with just a hint of Glee. It is slated it for a February debut.

Fox will also hit midseason running, airing Lost creator JJ Abrams’ Alcatraz in mid-January before throwing Touch, created by Tim Kring (Heroes) and starring Kiefer Sutherland (24), into the mix in March.

Another series receiving a lot of buzz is The River, coming to ABC in February. The part-horror, part-thriller follows the mystery surrounding a popular TV wildlife expert who disappears while making a documentary in the Amazon.

Meanwhile, Dustin Hoffman will bring horse racing to the small screen in HBO’s Luck, which is written by David Milch, the man behind the pay-TV network’s Western series Deadwood.

March will also see the fifth season of Mad Men finally arrive in the US.

Alex Strachan, writing for Canada.com, says that while midseason was once the dumping ground for shows not considered good enough to air in the fall, this view has changed whereby now networks and cable channels are saving some of their best shows for fear that they are drowned out amid the hubbub of the autumn schedules.

Down under, Network Nine will air a new season of its crime drama Underbelly, from Screentime Australia, while the same producer is behind Brothers in Arms, a retelling of the 1984 bikie war, for Network Ten.

The recent wave of Scandinavian drama will also show no signs of abating, with international broadcasters due to air Danish pubcaster DR’s political drama Borgen and The Bridge, a copro between Denmark’s Nimbus Films and Shine Group-owned Filmlance, while The Killing, also from DR, continues to reach new audiences.

One trend certain to keep everyone’s attention is the growth of original commissions from VoD platforms. Netflix in the US will make all eight episodes of Lilyhammer, starring Steven van Zandt, available online next month, while it is also producing a remake of the BBC series House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, which is slated for a late 2012 launch.

And with more viewers switching off their televisions and turning to alternative platforms, expect to hear about more original commissions going straight online over the next 12 months.