CONTENT WARSAW: Emese Ács at UFA Produkció oversees multiple format adaptations in Hungary, including The X-Factor and Farmer Wants a Wife. But now she and her team are developing original factual entertainment ideas and planning to set up a formats production hub, with half an eye on fiction.

Emese Ács

At the end of 2024, Fremantle-owned production house UFA in Germany announced it was reorganising its Hungarian activities to enable it to expand in the market.

Appointed to jointly manage the restructured Hungarian production unit, renamed UFA Produkció, were Ute Biernat, veteran international TV exec and CEO of UFA Show & Factual since June 2000, and Emese Ács, described by UFA CEO Sascha Schwingel at the time of the announcement as “a well-connected and experienced local expert.”

Then came Biernat’s decision to step down from her CEO role at the Cologne-based prodco following 25 years at the helm. At the same time, it was confirmed she would relinquish her management position at UFA Produkció in September.

The decision means that in a few short months the responsibility for expanding the Hungarian division will fall solely on Ács. Not that the change phases her; as she points out, this year marks a decade at the subsidiary, which was previously called UFA Magyarország.

In fact, it was Biernat and Schwingel who approached Ács 10 years ago to head the then newly created entertainment division of the Hungarian business. “They were seeking a head of the entertainment division at UFA Hungary, because UFA Fiction already existed, but there was a gap to fill in to produce entertainment for RTL Hungary back then,” she remembers. “This is how I became part of the UFA family of Germany, and how I have been part of UFA Hungary for 10 years. I just celebrated my 10th anniversary in May this year.”

Ács began her TV career in 2005 as an assistant in the creative division of Hungarian free-to-air television channel RTL Hungary. The network is owned by RTL Group, the Luxembourg-based international media conglomerate and parent company of Fremantle. Soon after, she took on the role of coproduction manager and got involved in acquisitions for the channel. This led her to international markets including Mipcom and MipTV.

Daily soap Barátok Közt (Amongst Friends) was produced for RTL Klub

By 2013, the globetrotting had triggered a decision to switch jobs – and countries – when she relocated to Amsterdam to work as a sales executive for Dutch format distribution specialist Absolutely Independent.

“I was really curious see what it was like to work on the other side of the table,” says Ács, who is fluent in Dutch and English. “I wanted to keep up the knowledge of my languages, so this is why I decided to move, and also to extend my network.”

It wasn’t long before she was sought out by UFA Show & Factual and she found herself back in Budapest, this time producing entertainment shows for the broadcaster she once worked for. In 2015, UFA Magyarország had already been active for 18 years, producing daily soap opera Barátok Közt (Amongst Friends) for RTL Klub. The show would later become the most successful and longest-running series on Hungarian television.

On the back of its success in fiction, Ács and the team at UFA Show & Factual were tasked with setting up non-fiction content arm. Within a year the division was producing Got Talent and Take Me Out for RTL Hungary, and by year two it was in production on The X-Factor and Farmer Wants a Wife for the same broadcaster.

“Now, in 2025, we are producing season 13 [of The X-Factor] and we are on season eight of Farmer Wants a Wife,” notes Ács.

Road trip talkshow Hit the Road was the first show developed in-house by UFA Produkció

In fact, over the past decade, UFA Hungary has produced a total of 16 entertainment shows, including two other major series, The Voice and The Masked Singer.

Nevertheless, it would take many more years before the prodco began making shows for other broadcasters in the market. “It wasn’t easy back then,” recalls Ács. In 2023, however, the prodco’s efforts paid off and it began making its first programme for another leading commercial broadcaster in Hungary, TV2.

“We had some strong titles and there was an opening up towards brand new ideas on the market and we were able to sell Family Feud [to TV2] in 2023. That gameshow went really well in production. And then [the opportunity to produce] Password came because TV2 was focusing on gameshows. And this year we were able to make the deal for The Farm and we are producing season six.”

By October 2024, when the reorganisation was unveiled, the renamed UFA Produkció had that year produced seven shows for three channels: five for RTL, namely S2 of The Apprentice, S7 of Farmer Wants A Wife, S2 of Hole in the Wall!, S4 of The Masked Singer and S12 of The X-Factor, and S1 of Password for TV2. But also, notably for the prodco, it commissioned its first original idea, Hit the Road, with Antenna Entertainment’s Viasat3.

Gameshow Password for TV2

For Ács, this was a particularly sweet moment, because she had long hoped of landing a commission for a format developed in-house. “It has always been my dream to come up with something original,” she explains. “We had had a lot of conversations over the last 10 years [with Viasat] and we were very close to doing deals on licences, but we have rather big formats and they were focusing on smaller-scale formats and I just had the idea: why not to come up with new ideas rather than trying to find something from the catalogue, because in the last seven, eight years we couldn’t find anything that would fit them.”

Hit the Road is a road trip talkshow hosted by Hungarian journalist András Sváby. Each episode features an invited celebrity guest who travels around Hungary in a camper van with the host. “At its core, the idea is simple. You just need a very good host. It is not shiny-floor show,” notes Ács, who said that from paper format to having the show on air took only a matter of two months.

The series performed so well that UFA is now in production on a second run for Viasat. “It was a very successful cooperation and we are very happy because this is the very first time that we were able to see how an idea becomes a real TV format that is successful,” says the exec.

RTL’s version of Farmer Wants A Wife

The hope now is for the format to be remade for other territories. “It will be in the Fremantle catalogue and my colleagues there really likes the idea. I can imagine there might be a moment when this travels to other countries, because the potential is there. It’s cost-efficient to produce, its celebrity-driven and you have a host who is genuinely interested in the celebrity. And nowadays, people need that. People need genuine, easy-to-follow and authentic formats.”

As well as developing original ideas, another key aim of the Hungarian division is to become a production hub for entertainment productions from elsewhere. Indeed, this was one of the ambitions set out by Biernat last October. “In UFA Produkció, we are creating a production hub in Hungary for entertainment productions, through which we can offer high-quality and cost-efficient production solutions far beyond the borders of Hungary itself,” she said at the time.

Finally, there is a plan to re-enter the fiction arena, following the cancellation of Amongst Friends in 2020 due to declining viewership. By the time the last episode aired on July 17, 2021, over 10,000 episodes of the series had aired over nearly 23 years.

“This is a mid-term plan,” says Ács about moving back into drama. “[At the moment], we continue to observe the market for when the right moment is to step in when the demand for fiction is there. For now, the focus is still entertainment, and this is good for us because we have a huge catalogue and very successful licences and we can continue to be successful in this field.”