Programming Profile

Recent high-profile appointments at Muse Entertainment signal a major focus on scripted and unscripted growth for the Montreal-based Coronor prodco.

During its 23 years in business, Muse Entertainment has grown to become one of the largest independent production companies in Canada.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it built a solid reputation in the scripted world with projects including the eight-part Canada-produced miniseries The Kennedys, about the lives of the Kennedy family; a North American remake of the British supernatural series Being Human, which ran for four seasons; the Canadian crime series Durham County; and the WWII-set Bomb Girls.

More recently, the company has found itself with a hit on its hands in the form of Coroner, a procedural crime drama commissioned by pubcaster CBC in Canada and airing on The CW in the US. It has also racked up sales to Nine Network, Sky and Paramount+, among others.

With a solid foundation in place, Muse now says it wants to significantly ramp up its scripted output. And if its most recent hire is anything to go by, the Montreal-based company means business.

In September, Muse revealed it had hired Tom Hastings as its VP of Scripted. The veteran broadcast executive left Canada’s Bell Media in January during a sweeping restructure that saw the departure of some of Canada’s most recognisable content executives, including Mike Cosentino and Corrie Coe. During his time with Bell Media, where he served as director of original programming, he worked on series such as Transplant, Cardinal and 19-2.

With Hastings’ departure, he instantly became one of the most sought-after executives in Canada, with Muse ultimately securing his services and tapping him to spearhead scripted growth from its Toronto office.

Hastings “is a big part of our overall goal to actively expand our scripted production business with quality projects amid the changing landscape in the English-language marketplace in Canada, where things have been skewing towards the streamer side from the broadcast side,” Muse founder, president and CEO Michael Prupas tells C21.

Muse is also exploring several coproductions as a means of furthering its scripted ambitions. Prupas says the company is in development on a scripted series with an Australia partner and has more recently started having discussions with a UK company about a potential partnership.

While scripted TV represents the biggest potential growth area for Muse, the company plans to continue investing in its TV movies business, which has been steady and lucrative for the past 20 years.

Muse produces in the range of nine to 12 TV movies each year. In the past, the majority of these movies were produced for Hallmark Channel. However, in recent years, as the global SVoD platforms have entered the movie space, new opportunities have arisen.

In 2019, Muse’s Netflix original romcom Good Sam debuted. The collaboration has led to further projects, with Muse producing the LGBTQ+ Christmas movie Single All the Way for the streamer. It is set to debut in December. Prupas adds that Muse is expecting to produce a Vietnam-shot project with Netflix early in the new year.

Another foundational aspect of its business model is service production, which has provided steady revenue over the past two decades and brought Muse into the orbit of some of the world’s biggest directors, producers and broadcasters.

In September, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was bringing its original series Three Pines, produced by Sony Pictures-owned The Crown producer Left Bank Pictures, to shoot in Quebec. Muse is providing production services on the project. Prupas says that service production continues to be a “door opener” for Muse, and that it will continue to build that aspect of the business while fostering its original IP ambitions.

Prupas is also quick to point out that unscripted is another area of significant focus. The company’s Toronto-based unscripted development team has been making inroads with the US streamers, securing a commission from CBC and Paramount+ for the documentary series For Heaven’s Sake, which premiered earlier this year. The 8×60’ project is a blend of documentary and comedy and explores the search for a man who mysteriously disappears from his remote cabin in Ontario in 1934.

Muse has also recently received a commission from Amazon Prime for a series called Mr. Big and from AMC-owned streamer Shudder for Cursed. In the same way that Muse hired Hastings to supercharge its scripted growth, the company announced this week that it has signed an exclusive first-look deal with Michael Kronish, the former Executive Vice President at Vice Media Group and an award-winning media executive, and film and TV producer. He will be developing and producing factual programming for the international market.

Looking ahead to 2022, Prupas says the hope is that its investments in content and new personnel will yield significant growth in both scripted and unscripted. “It’s a major goal for us. We’re laser-focused on getting further series productions up and running over the next year,” he says.