Root of the matter

Former BBC2 boss Jane Root is building a reputation in production circles for big-budget history docs and is eyeing a move into drama. Clive Whittingham reports.

Mankind: The Story of All of Us

Nutopia founder and CEO Jane Root has always been something of a trend-setter. In 1999, she became the first woman to control a BBC channel when she took over the reins at BBC2 and gave it a boost with series like The Apprentice and Who Do You Think You Are?

She left in 2004 and went on to work as president of Discovery Networks in the US before setting up London-based Nutopia in 2009. The company has built a business around ambitious, high-budget documentary series including America: The Story of Us and the follow-up Mankind: The Story of All of Us, which will premiere on History in the US and 20 worldwide territories on Wednesday, November 14.

In many ways Nutopia seemed a strange move for Root. Budgets have been steadily tightening all over the world since 2009 as the economic crisis took effect on the television industry; and factual channels are increasingly looking for character-led, returnable, reality series to stock their schedules rather than costly, blue-chip documentaries.

But the indie appears to be succeeding. As well as the History series, it recently made fact-based drama The British for Sky Atlantic and has been greenlit for The 80s: The Decade that Made Us by National Geographic. Broadcasters in the factual space now talk about ideas of scale and ambition as well as the cheaper schedule fillers and it’s that gap in the market that Root had her eye on when she launched Nutopia.

Jane Root

“We never had enough of those big ideas at BBC2, we never found an easy route to finding them and it was the same when I went to Discovery,” Root tells C21.

“There was definitely a sense that came from being involved in promoting Planet Earth when I was running Discovery in the US but also when I was at BBC2, that as we didn’t have as much marketing money as some of our competitors we had to fight to make an noise and get ourselves noticed.

“Part of the answer was event programming and we did stuff like Great Britons and Restoration that tried to really stand out and make a big noise. There are always lots of great smaller ideas around but then it felt like there was a bit of a gap to do really bold things.”

David McKillop, now at A&E, and Julian Hobbs, still with History, developed America: The Story of Us and its bigger and more ambitious follow-up Mankind with Root and Nutopia. The trio used to work together at Discovery. Mankind will eventually air in 150 countries in 37 languages.

The series includes a large amount of dramatised content based on fact, another trend Root seems to be pioneering. The ratings success of Hatfields & McCoys earlier this year has sent networks scurrying for similar dramas with a factual base. History is preparing Vikings for next year, Nat Geo has Killing Lincoln and recently acquired Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden from Hurt Locker producer Nicholas Chartier.

America: The Story of Us

It’s a path Root is keen to tread further, imminently expanding Nutopia into pure drama production. “We’re very fond of these big, almost scripted projects. We’re very shortly going to announce our first proper scripted show,” she says. “It’s fiction based on a real event. We’re taking a step into doing more purely drama in terms of production method.

“Big audiences are less tolerant of just being told facts. They want facts but they want to feel like they are moved and excited and thrilled by things. You can see that tendency in the way that a lot of popular history books are written.

“I definitely don’t think it’s dumbing things down. We worked with a Stanford professor, Ian Morris, on Mankind and when we showed a conference of Oxford historians clips and talked through the show and there was a real sense of excitement from the most erudite and learned academics in the world about the idea of using popular television in a new way.” Nutopia is also working on further projects for Sky after the success of The British.

But it’s the financing of these projects that’s most interesting. Nutopia is giving up the rights to Mankind so History can distribute and air it around the world and get its money’s worth. Nutopia does retain rights to some of its other projects and distributes through BBC Worldwide.

Root says: “The rights situation is different for different projects. I live in the States where it’s a slightly different situation: there’s more flexibility in terms of relationships with broadcasters.

“In Britain, people are just very focused on rights. Every production company wants to control rights but we’ve got really good partners with History and Discovery so there are other ways of making a good business relationship.

“Mankind will air in 150 countries and has been translated into 37 languages, it’s being shown in 20 countries in the same 24-hour period when it launches. If you find the right huge project it’s going to mean that much throughout the world that the economics for the networks really start to look quite different.”

Root sees a move into drama as a natural progression for the company. She says: “In The British, which recently aired on Sky, we worked with some really amazing actors, like Sam West, who did small parts for us but when you work with people of that calibre, you really do get amazing results.”

A dramatic change of direction for Nutopia then.