Will King & Conqueror reign in the ratings war?
SERIES MANIA: Rabbit Track Pictures co-founders James Norton and Kitty Kaletsky discuss their company’s five-year journey and why historical epic King & Conqueror is set to put them on the global stage.
Rabbit Track Pictures’ James Norton and Kitty Kaletsky
When it comes to British history, there are few events as infamous as the Battle of Hastings – the clash between King Harold and William the Conqueror that took place in 1066 and would come to define the future of England for a thousand years.
Now eight-part historical drama King & Conqueror sets out to dramatise that pivotal skirmish and explore the events that preceded it, and the figures responsible, by focusing on a pair of interconnected family dynasties struggling for power across two countries divided by sea.
“It’s an epic story about friendship, betrayal, family, legacy, love, loss and the birth of a new England,” according to Rabbit Track Pictures MD Kitty Kaletsky, previously at Number 9 Films, Archery Pictures and Black Bear Pictures, who launched the company with co-founder and actor James Norton.
“And it was an (almost) equally epic experience to bring the show together, alongside our ride-or-die fellow exec producer Rob Taylor of The Development Partnership, CBS Studios, the BBC, lead director Baltasar Kormákur and lead writer Michael Robert Johnson.”
Shooting the whole series in Iceland against its breathtaking landscapes gives the series a “beautiful and grand” visual style, Kaletsky adds, while it has “the power and potential to be enjoyed on a global scale. Audiences will be drawn as much to the action and politicking as to the intimate character portrayals between husbands and wives, and fathers and sons.”
Norton – speaking to C21 ahead of his Talent Masterclass session in Lille today – plays Harold in King & Conqueror and is joined in the cast by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Emily Beecham, Clémence Posey and Eddie Marsan. The BBC has acquired rights to the series for BBC One and BBC iPlayer in the UK, while Paramount Global Content Distribution is handling sales outside the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The show was certainly the talk of the London TV Screenings last month.
The project is the biggest yet for Rabbit Track, founded by Norton and Kaletsky five years ago and now part of Banijay Entertainment. Rabbit Track’s previous credits include Netflix feature Rogue Agent, while ITV psychological drama Playing Nice, in which Norton plays one half of a couple coming to terms with the discovery their toddler was swapped at birth in a hospital mix-up, aired at the start of this year. King & Conqueror will debut sometime in 2025.
“Rabbit Track has grown every year since we started, and we are not done yet,” Kaletsky says. “Having now joined the Banijay family, we have a real runway to expand and increase our footprint across both the film and television space.”
Highlighting the range of projects on their burgeoning slate, she says: “We’ve realised in searching for that elusive ‘creative mandate’ that, actually, what we’re looking for in a project defies definition, as all we really want is to be surprised, and to surprise our audience. Pretty much everything on our slate thus far has a ‘Shit, we have to do this’ quality, because the project has caught us off guard. Then, beyond subject matter and genre, we also need it to be commercial. Is there a path to production? Is this what people want to watch?”
The slate comprises a combination of optioned IP, original ideas pitched to them by writers they love and concepts they’ve taken out to writers themselves. “We do a mix of developing scripts in-house, and taking ideas to broadcasters, so that we get that investment from the channel early on,” Norton adds.
“Essentially, though, we love collaborating, whether that means starting on something from scratch, or jumping on to projects that are already a bit developed. We aren’t precious – quality and a connection with the material is the key.”
King & Conqueror fits the bill because it is “a story about family, generational trauma, marriage, trust and treachery, wrapped up in a big, commercial, period drama bow,” Kaletsky says. “It brilliantly reflects what we want to be doing: telling compelling stories that resonate emotionally and feel universal and commercial.”
