2023 Series Mania: Four Key Takeaways

2023 Series Mania: Four Key Takeaways,Takeaways from the 2023 Series Mania festival include the importance of local international fare, franchises, going broad and new ideas.

2023 Series Mania: Four Key Takeaways

Casey Bloys delivering the final keynote at Series Mania.SeriesMania

National protests in France threatened to disrupt the 2023 Series Mania television festival and international industry summit, but, in the end, the 2023 event went off without a hitch. Members of the global TV industry gathered in the northern French city of Lille to celebrate the best in new small-screen drama and ponder the future of the business.

Here are the four big industry takeaways.

Everyone’s Going Local

Netflix original series Transatlantic, is produced out of Germany

A few years back, all the major streamers were touting their global appeal, but with subscription growth slowing, the battle for business has moved to the local level. At Series Mania, execs for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Paramount+ all touted their local credentials.

It’s All About the Franchise

Richard Madden as Mason Kane, Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Nadia Sinh in Citadel. — CitadelCourtesy of Prime Video/Amazon Studios

With budgets tightening, streamers are putting the few big bets on proven formats or those with strong franchise potential. Paramount+ international boss Marco Nobili noted the studio-backed platform was looking to build out franchises around its hit series Dexter and Yellowstone as well as non-scripted formats, such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, which recently saw its local-language Italian version renewed for a third season and has editions set for Brazil, Germany and Mexico as well as a “Global Drag Race All Stars” format planned.

“Having these big mass franchises that are really becoming popular is something that is critical for us,” said Nobili. “We know how to create popular content the same way as we know how to make content popular. You will hear us saying that over and over again.”

A new twist on the franchise model was on display at Series Mania, with Paramount+ promoting NCIS: Sydney, the first international spinoff of its hit procedural, produced by CBS Studios in association with Endemol Shine Australia. Amazon Prime’s Farrell also talked up the Russo Brothers’ upcoming spy thriller Citadel, which will go out as a high-end U.S. version, starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and as two local-language spin offs in India and Italy.

“It’s such a cool way to take [subscribers] on a journey and no one has really done it before,” said Farrell, who noted that his non-U.S. team will seek more Citadel-like universes across both scripted and unscripted.

Aggregate, Aggregate, Aggregate

The new model for streaming platforms appears to be the buffet. With the exception of AppleTV+, which maintains a small output of high-end series and documentaries, streamers and pay-TV platforms are going broad, adding non-scripted and more broad-appeal fare in an attempt to offer something for everyone.

Talking about the still-unnamed joint HBO Max/Discovery+ platform, HBO boss Bloys said, “It’s kind of replicating the cable bundle. That’s frankly what I think all streaming services are trying to figure out. How can you put the bundle together that will attract the most subscribers and keep the largest number of subscribers? It can’t just be HBO on its own or just reality shows [it has to be] a combination that people will come here for whatever mood they are in.”

Sky Studios CEO Cécile Frot-Coutaz noted that platforms that act as aggregators — Sky offers HBO content as well as its own originals, for example — will have an advantage in the current market, where there is simply “too much content out there” and audiences have a “real demand for simplification.”

No Shortage of New Ideas

Ukrainian war drama Unspoken won Series Mania’s 2023 Best Project Award.

Based on the offering on display at Series Mania, the original content boom shows no sign of abating. The conference halls and industry sessions were packed with independent producers and creatives offering up new program pitches, many of which attracted industry interest.

Unspoken, a war drama/thriller series set in the real-life war in Ukraine, won the Series Mania Forum Best Project Award, the top prize of the festival’s Co-Pro Pitching Sessions, taking the €50,000 ($53,500) cash award to go towards development of the show. Produced by Match & Spark (Poland), Toy Cinema and 2Brave Productions (Ukraine), the six-episode series is created by Filip Syczyński, who is co-writing with Zhanna Ozirna. Elsewhere, the Finnish project Yours, Margot and the Belgium-Uruguay co-production The Invisible Ink won the Beta Development Awards, which came with €50,000 ($54,000) in development cash.

Even as the global streamers look to produce more local series, said Beta Film’s managing director Moritz von Kruedener, the opportunities for pan-European or other international co-productions will continue to grow.

“Even if you’re only producing locally, national funding is not enough,” he said. “I think the coming years will be a golden time for co-production.”