The PUSH and pull of Paris in the spring

By Siobhan Crawford 06-05-2025

C21’s resident formats expert Siobhan Crawford delivers her key takeaways from last week’s Paris Unscripted Showcase in the French capital.

The inaugural unscripted formats market PUSH

Let me paint you a picture: glorious sunshine, warm weather, strolling seven minutes past the Arc de Triomphe each day after your Parisian breakfast with friends, then session after session on your favourite specialist subject while being fed the most delicious snacks constantly and catching up regularly with industry gossip in one central location. At night, balmy evenings with Ubers taking you all over Paris for Peruvian and Indian restaurants or boats with your new favourite hub partners, before returning to your Mecca, the lit-up Arc, to end another day.

Now realise a few things: this was my reality in Paris last week for the inaugural PUSH, TF1 knows where the best choux pastry in the entire city is and out of nothing magic can happen.

Darling PUSH
This is the brainchild event of Satisfaction France and Dreamspark, two independent production houses within France, both committed to unscripted content.

PUSH, the endearing and charming acronym we use for the Paris Unscripted Showcase (long may it reign), was formed by a collection of independents as a response to many events occurring in London that sideline smaller companies, but also recognising that Europe is where international formats are born. So, the founders (including Satisfaction, Dreamspark, M6 Formats, France Television, Webedia, WeMake, Mediawan, Effervescence) created PUSH, a three-day event dedicated to Formats, giving distributors and producers the opportunity to showcase in 50-minute sessions.

Let’s make that very clear now – this is an unscripted formats market – possibly the first and only one. There is no factual here or scripted formats. The beauty in the 200 buyers that attended, as Satisfaction announced during their showcase, is that we are all looking for the same thing: structured, replicatable, tested, unscripted formats. Of the attendees, the majority were production houses, probably a 70/30 ratio to broadcasters, but the streamers were out in force (never seen so many Amazons in one place), plus we had multiple US networks and Australian network reps. Over 15 sessions and three hosted cocktails, we have probably been pitched 70+ formats with the prodcos saving their new launches for this event – as the flurry of news announcements can prove.

Chilling with friends in Paris

The lowdown
You may be saying ’yeah, but she has French affiliations now, maybes it’s all fluff’, well I still have a Dutch heart and mouth, so you will find only truths come out of me (but only in a polite way while working with the French clients). And I polled a lot of people to understand if it was just me who found this magical. It was a consensus.

Do you remember the first MipTV back after Covid, in what must have been 2022? PUSH felt like that. It was like we shrank the market and my Formatland family were in one place. It just had good energy.

Content: No one cared if we had seen things before, this was quality time with sales updates but thankfully a lot of new content. Cougar Island from M6 Formats, That’s My Chair from Dreamspark and Mediawan, Focus from Satisfaction and Stranger Sins from Can’t Stop Media will probably be the talk of the market. I am sure my anonymous friend Matthieu Porte wants me to remember other titles but all I can think about is Stranger Sins! Yes, this delightful man pitched this tawdry sexual format and I immediately want the Latin version.

Loved: This market was set in two venues, so there was no rushing between cinemas. Each day you were in the same place, with the same people to network and then fed too. Even though there were lists for sessions it was quickly understood that the format buyers are the same for most sessions and so doors were opened more easily as the days passed.

Problems: On Monday PUSH was due to start at 2pm, which is already later than needed I think and there were two initial cancellations (Primitives and Banijay), which created some concern about the event to come. Badge collection was a nightmare on day one and delayed all sessions but was rectified for the next couple of days. The aforementioned ‘lists’ were also a cause for delay because, while PUSH is an open event, the individual screenings did have RSVP lists due to limited seating. Limited seating was also an issue, standing room only for some sessions but again easily fixed next time. Travel problems… weirdly it was easier getting out of Spain during a power blackout then leaving Paris via Eurostar, but that’s small.

Of Note: One Dutch broadcaster quite rightly said they had taken more taxis in these three days than in their entire career in Cannes and probably this was true. The TF1 cocktail was at their tower, Mediawan is not particularly central and dinners were privately organised but spread out. I think perhaps the heat and the newness of the city to many meant the tube was not utilised but I have never been more delighted to grab a 20-minute tube for €2.50 than a 50-minute taxi.

Changes: They will need a change in venue for the next PUSH (with strong AC) for more seats. A neutral venue will need to be chosen for all sessions ideally because one venue for back-to-back sessions was perfect. And that is the second thing, we can’t have any more overlapping sessions. If we are there to see formats only, we need to see them all and that means only one session can run at once. This should give us space for c.21 sessions of 50 minutes but noting that some companies did not need their entire slots. I would say feed us less, but the generosity of the French was unrivalled, we should just show more self-restraint.

The proviso
We will need to be careful not to make PUSH into something for everyone. It is a very special opportunity to be an event solely for European format creators and distributors, similar events already exist in the documentary and scripted space in Sunnyside and SeriesMania. We also need to make people aware that some paper formats are being discussed as ‘upcoming projects’ or ‘in development’ projects, but this is not a market for creators to pitch exclusively paper ideas in pitches.

There is no ‘market floor’ with tables/booths and the event would be spoilt by this. There will need to be a level maintained to keep this event effective. I also don’t think we can support a diluted version where each country has a showcase because we need to be effective with our time and travel budgets, it would be ideal if this was the market for formats in Europe as the timing is also good for the flurry of new content commissioned with summer production schedules, potentially enough time to restock before MIPCOM (but still tight). Plus, many people are connected to Paris by a train, let’s be honest. Yes, we had Italians and Spanish fly in, but this is a convenient location to meet.

The dates for next year are already in discussion (trying to take into account all the European bank holidays). I expect many of you will hear the positive things and decide to join us, rightly.  I think this event may have just rebooted a French love affair for many of us.