Lucky 8 principals Greg Henry and Kim Woodard on how US producers are striking new kinds of rights deals with networks, and why Comcast and Warner Bros Discovery’s respective decisions to separate their cable assets provides some much-needed clarity after two years of commissioning paralysis.

Greg Henry and Kim Woodard

For the past two decades, US unscripted producers have focused almost exclusively on their home market – and for good reason.

While the business itself has never been straightforward, the business model was simple: producers pitched to the networks, which would develop and greenlight the ones they liked and take full control of the rights.

As a result, there wasn’t a major incentive for American unscripted makers to look beyond their own borders, as there were plenty of commissions (and dollars) to go around and, even if they wanted to, they weren’t able to exploit the rights to those projects outside the US.

But great changes have taken place over the past three years as the collapse of the US cable business has created hitherto unimaginable financial pressures for the major studios. The impact has been that cable networks, which for years have been the commissioning bedrock of the US unscripted sector, are not willing or able to fully fund shows.

That reality has inflicted enormous economic hardship on the once-buoyant American factual industry, with tightening budgets, fewer overall commissions and smaller episode orders for the shows that do get made.

Amid those challenges, however, grey areas are beginning to emerge in unscripted deal-making that was previously very black and white. Networks that had previously insisted on taking all worldwide rights, whether they intended to exploit them internationally or not, are becoming more open to deals that only involve taking US rights.

“[Previously], the networks were able to pay a price that encompassed all of the rights, essentially, and so as a business, you could look at that and say it’s worth being work-for-hire,” explain Greg Henry, who leads Stamford, Connecticut-based Lucky 8 alongside co-founder and co-president Kim Woodard.

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“What’s really interesting in the American market is what’s old is new again, because when I came up in the business through the 90s and early 2000s, there was a very robust coproduction model. It just kind of went to the wayside for a period of time, and now it’s back.”

Lucky 8 produces shows including A&E’s Booked: First Day In, 60 Days In and Ozark Law; Netflix’s Unlocked: A Jail Experiment; Nat Geo’s To Catch a Smuggler; History’s The Food That Built America and The Mega-Brands That Built America; and Disney+ and Nat Geo’s Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper.

According to Henry, the trend of US networks being more flexible around rights started around 18 months ago, and it is driving US production companies to operate in the international marketplace in ways they haven’t done in the past.

For Lucky 8, that has meant launching its own distribution division, led by former Beyond Rights and Hat Trick International executive Sarah Bickley.

The Lucky 8 team attended both Mipcom and Content London for the first time in 2024 in its expanded capacity as a distribution entity, looking to sell finished tape and secure financing for in-development projects. Its slate ranges from natural history and ancient history to special access law enforcement projects.

The underlying thesis behind what’s happening is that, more than ever, US networks and producers need to work together to get anything made, says Woodard.

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“Even before we [launched the distribution division], we had clients saying ,‘We’d really like to do this show, but we don’t need all the rights. Can you help us figure this out?’ And so we were making deals but trying to learn as we went, and then we decided to bring in someone who’s been doing this their entire career.”

These new deal models represent around one-third of Lucky 8’s business today, with the other two-thirds being split between all-rights streaming deals (usually for higher-budgeted shows) and cable series involving all-rights buyouts.

In addition to co-financing its own projects in the international market, Lucky 8 is also beginning to handle distribution on some projects developed and produced by third parties.

The challenges facing the linear television business in the US are well documented. In particular, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), Disney, Paramount and Comcast’s longtime profit engine, cable, is in a state of rapid decline, while still turning meaningful profits for all of those companies.

Over the past three months, both Comcast and WBD have announced major shake-ups in their respective cable businesses.

Comcast is spinning off seven of its cablenets, MSNBC, USA Network, CNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel, into a separate publicly traded company. The formation of the new entity, which does not include broadcaster NBC, streamer Peacock or reality cablenet Bravo, is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

In December, WBD revealed it will reorganise under two main divisions, with its cable assets being separated from its studio and streaming interests. The move would appear to set up potential M&A moves.

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At this stage, it is not immediately clear what the commissioning or content strategy for Comcast’s SpinCo will look like. Likewise, at WBD, it is not clear whether the cable separation, set to be completed by mid-2025, will result in a meaningful strategic shift in its own cable business, which is now being overseen by Channing Dungey following the retirement of Kathleen Finch at the end of last year.

However, for producers who have spent years trying to understand what the future looked like, this represents progress, says Woodard.

For both the networks and the producers who sell to them, there has been something of a “paralysis” for the past couple of years, she notes. But now, “that paralysis is giving way to a business situation where people actually have the structure where they can get things greenlit.”

There is also the sense that, after two years of cost-cutting, the networks now have a clearer idea themselves of what their content budgets will look like in 2025.

“From what we’ve seen, at some of the big corporations, the content spend has been a moving target,” observes Henry. “Just simple things like that, for a network to know what they need to spend and what they need to commission.”

With more clarity in the marketplace, buyers at the various networks and studio groups will hopefully be empowered take more risks in what they choose to greenlight.

“Due to market circumstances, I don’t know that [commissioning executives] felt they could take big risks in 2024,” says Woodard. “There was a lack of clarity around things like, ‘How long am I going to be in this job?’ and ‘Am I one bad decision away from losing it?’ There’s a certain sense that we know who’s in charge in 2025. Things have been put into place, so let’s go, let’s get after it.”

With that clarity apparently coming back into the US market, Woodard adds that it is critical for all producers to be actively developing, pitching and putting themselves back on the buyers’ radars after a very quiet 2024.

“What we started to see in the last couple of months of 2024 were changes happening, so if you are not in constant contact with the folks that are your partners or your potential clients, you’re going to miss the evolution of their business strategy,” she says.

“It’s more important than ever to be in constant conversation with buyers and creators about what is taking place. I do think we’re now entering a period of rapid change.”