With the pandemic and Black Lives Matters movement pulling blue-light factual entertainment programming in opposite directions, how do you make medical shows cut through a torrent of competition, and what will replace potentially toxic cop shows? Clive Whittingham reports.

Criminal Minds showrunner Simon Mirren recently told C21 the Black Lives Matters movement and controversy around alleged police brutality in the US had changed the demand for cop shows almost overnight.

From a staple of broadcast, cable and streamer line-ups Mirren said police-focused shows were now somewhat toxic. “What’s happening here now, because of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matters, is when you’re pitching a cop show like Criminal Minds they just don’t want to hear it because they don’t believe the youth want to hear anything to do with cops.

“It’s interesting because some of the biggest shows of the last 20, 30 or 40 years on TV anywhere in any country have been cop shows. There’s a feeling now they don’t want them. There’s a moratorium – no cop shows.”

Although Mirren was talking about his home genre of drama, unscripted is facing its own similar moment. A+E Networks-owned A&E had regularly trumpeted its Live PD show as a breakout factual entertainment success, stripping the show across several hours on Friday and Saturday nights to large ratings.

The show was a boon for production company Big Fish Entertainment, which was bought by US studio MGM as a result of its success, but following the death of George Floyd in police custody, the show was cancelled. And when it transpired that Live PD had filmed another incident of brutality in Texas and deleted the footage, other companies, such as ViacomCBS, started severing ties with Big Fish on other shows.

Rob Sharenow, president of programming at A+E, described it as a “challenging moment for the brand, country and network.”

“A+E is a brand that listens to culture and prides itself on being part of the cultural conversation and being on the front lines of things. A+E was not a one-show channel and it has a really well defined brand that leans into this front row experience – real people in the real world doing real things. Culture is so fragmented now and what’s resonated for A&E over the years have been really tapped into universal themes.”

What’s required in the ‘new normal’ is cop shows that work a little bit harder and go a little bit further than simply “live cops.” Experienced UK producer Malcolm Brinkworth has specialised in producing high-end, fresh takes on seemingly conventional genres, such as Married to a Paedophile for Channel 4 and Critical Condition for ViacomCBS-owned UK terrestrial Channel 5. He has Police: Hour of Duty and forthcoming Suspect Number One for C5 as well, and his US version of The Accused recently wrapped on A&E.

“The key thing is we’re always trying to make sure we’re not only doing it in a responsible way but also a way that genuinely informs the public,” he says. “There’s genuine purpose to the shows, it’s not just to titillate and entertain.

“Responsible programme-making forms part of a genuine conversation that fits in with Black Lives Matters. It’s not a situation where you’re following crime and you’re blind to the wider issues. We want to make sure everything is genuinely diverse and portrayed in its proper context.”

The quest for a different sort of cop show recently led broadcast network ABC to take a chance on Belgian format Emergency Call, distributed by Amsterdam-based Lineup Industries and produced in the US by 8Hours Television. The slower-burn format is set in the call centre that initially receives the 911 calls and unusually does not show the action of the emergency, nor provide a conclusion to what happened for the audience.

Lineup co-founder Julian Curtis says: “The worry in the US with the whole situation as it is now with Black Lives Matters and Defund the Police is there is a black mark against the police. Other series showed the end result whereas we’re there in the first seconds where people are trying to help. You cannot mistake what people are doing in our show for anything other than help. Our show focuses on people seldom seen.

“There will be more shows involving key workers. I don’t know what form they will take – maybe gameshows with them winning things.”

His fellow co-founder Ed Louwerse adds: “The buyers initially always said it was an issue having no conclusion. Then you start watching episodes and it’s the opposite and you understand. It gives a certain tension.”

Elsewhere in the blue-light genre, demand has gone in the opposite direction. The Covid-19 pandemic, and praise across the world for frontline healthcare workers in all countries, has sparked a glut of factual entertainment commissions centred on hospitals and ambulances to both document the pandemic crisis and highlight the heroic work done by doctors, nurses and paramedics. The difficulty is that demand has come because of a thing that, in theory, makes getting access to these facilities to film harder than ever.

UK-based distribution and coproduction funding agency Drive distributes Helicopter ER from producer Air TV. Ben Barrett, Drive’s co-MD, says: “In the UK, we love a good blue-light show perhaps more than many other territories. There’s a huge amount of content produced here. At the moment things that involve medical, emergency, rescues and positive stories with positive outcomes and showcasing amazing work done by emergency services is popular.

“Helicopter ER is produced in a fairly unique way. Air TV are multi-talented pilots as well as producer cameramen; that’s how they make that show. There are a couple of other series we’re looking at now at earlier stages with access to multiple emergency services. We’re not at the coal face but there does still seem to be access being granted, albeit with a whole load of additional protocols.”

“Producers are still managing to make it work. They’ve mined relationships over years and there’s a level of trust,” adds co-MD Lilla Hurst.

Indeed, despite the problems with Live PD, A&E has renewed its spin-off series Live Rescue, which focuses more on the fire and ambulance services than the police.

Drive also distributes Channel 4 doc The Mum Who Got Tourettes, which speaks to another couple of fact ent trends that have emerged from the horrors of 2020: a turn of the wheel on medical shock docs and more heart-warming and uplifting stories for viewers in a time of global crisis.

“Ten years ago, Channel 4 and Channel 5 were constantly battling for shock docs and that never fully went away,” says Hurst. “People are still fascinated by stories of somebody living with something highly unusual on a day-to-day basis and seeing how they cope with it.”

“The big difference is they were visually focusing on the medical anomaly,” adds Barrett. “The physical side of it was key to the programme. This was tonally quite different. It felt like this film is more sensitive to the contributor – a brilliant character and able to talk about the condition quite powerfully.”

“The general appetite for uplifting, warm and hopeful is here for some time because the situation we’re in right now – the economy, the virus, the environment – none of it is going away,” Hurst concludes. “People want TV that is comforting and reassuring. Our new fact ent series are responding to that.”

Another key focus of a summer spent, for vast numbers of us, in lockdown has been the increasing importance and focus on daytime. Meredith Chambers of Sony-owned prodco Electric Ray recently produced Call That Hard Work, a workplace obs doc for BBC1’s daytime schedule. He says that while it was always a mistake to write off the daytime audience as simply retired people, that’s particularly true now with so many more people at home.

“The really clever thing about daytime, particularly at the BBC, is they say, ‘Don’t just pitch us old shows.’ There were always students, young mums and people not working [who were] watching,” he says. “Their mantra has always been make a show for everybody. A lot of shows that work in daytime are quite blue-light or journalistic.

“The genius of daytime is it’s more creative and playful than a lot of peaktime. Don’t second guess the audience and make it for octogenarians who’ll put it on anyway. It’s a fussy audience that won’t just watch anything. The temptation is [to make] another antiques format, or another property format, or homes in the sun. What was brave about this commission was that it’s not in that territory and they are trying to broaden out.

“They are bigger audiences now but it’s not an old audience. They are discriminating. In the summer, you go sit in the garden if you don’t want to watch it, so daytime has a very demanding audience.”

Few genres have changed as much in such a short period of time as factual entertainment in 2020. Staple programmes, like police obs docs, have become toxic while others, such as medical shows, have surged in popularity but now face access issues like never before. Daytime has become peaktime and gritty shock docs are having to become uplifting to appeal to a fairly miserable audience.

It’s a lot for producers to contend with, but as a genre with relatively low budgets and often super-quick turnarounds, it’s one that stands to gain more than most in the coming recession.

With the pandemic and Black Lives Matters movement pulling blue-light factual entertainment programming in opposite directions, how do you make medical shows cut through a torrent of competition, and what will replace potentially toxic cop shows? Clive Whittingham reports.

Criminal Minds showrunner Simon Mirren recently told C21 the Black Lives Matters movement and controversy around alleged police brutality in the US had changed the demand for cop shows almost overnight.

From a staple of broadcast, cable and streamer line-ups Mirren said police-focused shows were now somewhat toxic. “What’s happening here now, because of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matters, is when you’re pitching a cop show like Criminal Minds they just don’t want to hear it because they don’t believe the youth want to hear anything to do with cops.

“It’s interesting because some of the biggest shows of the last 20, 30 or 40 years on TV anywhere in any country have been cop shows. There’s a feeling now they don’t want them. There’s a moratorium – no cop shows.”
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