Blue Ant acquires BossaNova Development Day docs, comedy The Ambassador
Alice Roberts presents The Land That Made Us
MIPCOM: Canada’s Blue Ant Media has acquired two factual series from UK content creation, funding and distribution company BossaNova Media’s Development Day initiative, in addition to the licensing rights to scripted comedy series The Ambassador.
The first factual series, The Land That Made Us (6×60’), is being introduced to buyers by BossaNova for the first time at Mipcom this week.
Produced by Tectonic Productions, an indie established by Professor Alice Roberts and long-time collaborators Dom Bowles and Theo Williams, the series follows Roberts as she travels the length and breadth of Britain to explore how geology and landscape have shaped communities and regional identities.
BossaNova also presold the series to Channel 4 in the UK, BBC Select in the US and SBS in Australia.
Samantha Bee in The Ambassador
Blue Ant has also acquired 8×60’ historical mystery series Ruins: Rise & Fall. Produced by Like a Shot Entertainment, the show uses immersive 3D CGI to reanimate ruins from the ancient world, taking viewers to eight global locations and digitally restoring them to their former glory.
Blue Ant will air The Land That Made Us on its Cottage Life channel, with Ruins: Rise & Fall set to broadcast on Smithsonian Channel Canada.
BossaNova’s Development Day event aims to fast-track the commissioning and production of factual projects with international potential. For both these series, the entire production budget was guaranteed, with BossaNova fully cash-flowing the production.
Meanwhile, Blue Ant has acquired the licensing rights to scripted comedy The Ambassador (10×30’), which it is showcasing to international buyers for presale in Cannes.
Produced by Amaze Film & Television for Canadian commissioning broadcaster the CBC, it stars Samantha Bee (Full Frontal with Samantha Bee) and is set to premiere next year.
The workplace comedy is set at a scrappy Canadian embassy in Bulgaria and follows a former actor-turned-savvy-yet-unorthodox-diplomat and her childhood best friend, a sharp, policy-driven deputy head of mission, who are sent to the hinterland of global diplomacy to uncover new business opportunities in a rapidly shifting world.
The Ambassador is led by showrunner and executive producer Emily Andras (Wynonna Earp, Lost Girl), with Bee and Harkin also exec producing. Exec producing for Amaze Film & Television are Teza Lawrence and Michael Souther.
Also leading Blue Ant’s scripted slate for Mipcom is Signals (8×45′), an English-language thriller set in Iceland, commissioned by Icelandic broadcaster Siminn, Sky Showtime and Canal + Poland. Produced by Nordic production house Sagafilm, the series is in post-production for transmission early next year.
Thriller Signals is set in Iceland
Signals centres on a police officer and her partner who find themselves pursuing the same unknown extremist group from opposite sides of an unfolding national crisis. Bound by professional secrecy and unable to compare what they know, their investigations, and their relationship, come under increasing strain as a wave of cyberattacks and terrorist acts pushes Iceland towards collapse.
The series was created by Margrét Örnólfsdóttir (Hildur), Sjón (The Northman), Jóhann Ævar Grímsson (Trapped) and Óskar Jónasson (Reykjavik-Rotterdam). Jónasson also directs the series.
Elsewhere on Blue Ant’s scripted slate are all five seasons of Kim’s Convenience (65×30’), a comedy about a Korean-Canadian family running a Toronto corner store, recently licensed to Peacock in the US, and both seasons of its spin-off series Strays (20×30’), which is set in an animal shelter.
These are joined by character-driven crime drama In the Pines (6×60’, Meta Films), inspired by real events and set inside a criminal enterprise built on deception; Elkhorn (18×60’, Morningstar Entertainment), a Western chronicling a young Theodore Roosevelt’s transformation following devastating personal loss; and Suspect (2×90’, Orchard Studios), a factual drama that reconstructs police interrogations from high-profile true-crime cases in real time.
