DJ Nurre and Michael Heyerman discuss Endemol Shine North America’s UK-shot period dating series The Courtship and how it fits into the broader strategy to bring the production values associated with scripted drama into the reality realm.

Dating format The Courtship is set in Regency England

Ask any unscripted producer about the main challenges of making content in 2022 and you will likely hear one shared observation: getting commissioners and audiences to pay attention to new content and formats is harder than ever.

Amid a sea of content, where every show ever made is only a couple of clicks away, new programmes need to stand out clearly in order to have even the faintest chance of piquing a commissioner’s interest. If you do manage to secure a green light, the question becomes whether or not you can almost flawlessly execute your vision in a way that will hook audiences and create buzz.

It is against this backdrop that Endemol Shine North America (ESNA) is taking one of its biggest swings to date with The Courtship (fka Pride & Prejudice: An Experiment in Romance), an original dating format set in Regency England.

The jumping-off point for the show is that the modern dating world is failing people who are genuinely looking for romance, connection and true love. And what better way to solve that problem than to send one heroine back in time and have 16 suitors vie to win her heart through handwritten love letters, formal dances and other challenges harkening back to the early 19th century?

The central premise is that better courtship leads to better relationships. And in a slight twist on the traditional dating format, the heroine’s family and best friend also have a degree of input and influence upon her decisions.

The Courtship is bold, grandiose and visually arresting – and the ESNA team knows it has to be if it is to cut through the clutter.

Michael Heyerman

“We thought of it more like a film,” says DJ Nurre, ESNA’s executive VP, unscripted, of the approach to the show, which launched this week on NBC and Peacock in the US.

“We’re not just competing with other dating shows, we’re competing with Game of Thrones and re-runs of Seinfeld and Friends and everything that’s ever been created, so you’ve got to make something that’s noisy or loud, or so personal,” says Nurre. “Everything has got to be ultra special.”

Nurre and the ESNA team believe they have found that something special in The Courtship, which is a rare project that can be described as a premium period reality series. The show is produced by ESNA in association with its Banijay-owned British sister company Shine TV.

Nurre says the concept had been “bouncing around” the head of Sean Loughlin, ESNA’s senior VP of unscripted development, for close to a decade but “it just never really got outside the doors.”

That all changed a couple of years ago when the ESNA team sensed that the timing might be right to begin pitching the project in a serious way.

Their intuition was on the money, with the company quickly attracting interest from several buyers. Shortly after, ESNA had a green light from NBCniversal (NBCU)-owned streamer Peacock.

“This thing went from a pitch to selling faster than anything I’ve seen in the last decade,” says Nurre. “We were shopping for castles 30 seconds later.”

The castle they eventually secured was Castle Howard near the city of York, the same location used as the Duke of Hastings’ house in season one of Netflix’s Bridgerton.

DJ Nurre

Production took place over seven weeks in September and October 2021, with a mammoth crew and production team that, at its height, topped 500 people, including a troop of background dancers, a string quartet, a horse and carriage, and an “army” of wardrobe personnel.

It wasn’t without its challenges. “It’s beautiful and you can see the production value in every single shot, but castles are very difficult to shoot in,” says ESNA’s senior VP of unscripted original series Michael Heyerman, adding that the production team had to “build our infrastructure” around the beautiful but not especially production-friendly house.

ESNA cast Nicole Remy, a software engineer from Washington, as the heroine following an America-wide search that left “no stone unturned,” says Nurre. Given that the show is set in the UK, the production team also decided to tap British TV presenter Rick Edwards as the host, in addition to a mixture of US and UK suitors.

“We had a pretty long list [of potential hosts] but once we heard Rick’s sense of humour and how much he got the show, it was pretty quick to get him to sign up. Then we were off and running,” says Heyerman.

While the initial green light came solely from Peacock, NBCU later floated the idea of also airing the show on NBC in primetime. The move fits within a broader developmental shift at NBCU, with shows moving between linear and streaming to find the best home.

Heyerman and Nurre says that when they were developing the show they didn’t envision it as being exclusively for a streaming platform, so the addition of a linear run on NBC was welcome news.

“If we had remained on Peacock, and not been lucky enough to go to NBC, I don’t think we would’ve made the show any differently,” says Heyerman. “The timings might have been different here and there but, for the most part, the show we were delivering to Peacock is the same show we delivered to NBC.”

The show follows 16 suitors who vie to win the heroine’s heart

Having launched this week in the US (on Sunday night on NBC and the following day on Peacock), the next step is for Banijay Rights to begin selling the first season of the US version globally. In addition, the format is being pitched for local adaptations across the Banijay footprint.

While ESNA is not directly involved in shopping the format and finished tape internationally, Nurre says he believes The Courtship has the ingredients to attract global interest. “It’s a social experiment, a dating show, that sucks you in. It’s a guilty pleasure but also has big transcendent themes that we can all learn from,” he says.

As ESNA continues to build out its unscripted slate – which includes Big Brother (CBS), MasterChef and MasterChef Junior (Fox), Wipeout (TBS), the Below Deck franchise (Bravo) and recently launched competition build series Foodtastic (Disney+) – Nurre says the goal is to push the envelope with projects that will set ESNA apart from other producers in the space.

“Our strategy is to do scary stuff. Our strategy is to conceptualise, pitch and execute the shows that would crush many other producers,” he says.

In the future, the company is aiming to double down on that strategy of bringing the production values associated with scripted content into the factual space. “We thought, let’s make a show that appeals to platforms that house scripted content and viewers that like scripted content, but let’s bring that aesthetic, production value and polish to an unscripted format. That was really the intention,” says Nurre.

The Courtship is an original format developed and produced by ESNA, with production services provided by Shine TV. Executive producers include Sharon Levy, DJ Nurre, Michael Heyerman, Anthony Dominici, Sharon Levy, Shyam Balsé, Susy Price and Andy Cadman.