Thursday 2nd February 2012
On Friday it was announced that the most successful British comedy of all time, Only Fools & Horses, is to be adapted into an American sitcom by ABC. This classic BBC series began its life back in 1983. Its Christmas specials topped the annual audience ratings charts in 1996 and again in 2001 – the latter garnered a phenomenal 21.3m viewers on BBC1 which represented a staggering 74% audience share. That’s Royal Wedding territory! Earlier that year, a much smaller sitcom premiered on BBC airwaves – The Office … Read more…
Wednesday 7th December 2011
The problems for international producers trying to break into China are many. There’s heavy regulation and censorship, and a whole set of different rules for foreign companies setting up in Beijing or Shanghai. There’s also a completely different structure to the Film & TV industries, when compared to Europe or North America. For instance, a feature film in China makes on average 64.7% of its revenue from its domestic theatrical release, which makes cinemas the dominant mode of distribution. Contrast that with the U.S. where the domestic cinema … Read more…
Thursday 20th October 2011
If you listen to the promos on Fox, or the rhetoric coming from the Simon Cowell camp, the first season of the US version of The X Factor should be considered a runaway success. After all, it is consistently winning the hour for Fox in the key 18-49 demo on both nights it has been airing. In total viewers, it is ranging from 10.5m to 12.5m – in the US market, anything over 10m viewers is these days deemed very successful. Yet, there remains this nagging doubt that … Read more…
Thursday 8th September 2011
The Indian film industry is full of them. They were once a staple of Hollywood. Now television is trying to embrace the musical drama. With the phenomenal success of Fox’s Glee, and the imminent arrival of the Spielberg-NBC drama, Smash, TV networks are making a concerted effort to succeed with a genre that has traditionally been a ratings challenge. Now when I refer to musical dramas, I mean solely scripted series where the characters break out into song, either naturally (e.g. a character sings on stage), or unnaturally … Read more…
Friday 24th June 2011
DirecTV are doing something interesting with their entertainment channel. On 1st June, they rebranded their ‘101’ channel and it is now called the Audience Network. Its purpose is to show high quality dramas, but from a diverse range of sources. This might sound like the mission of many other networks, but when you dig deeper, the story with DirecTV is slightly different. For those who don’t know, DirecTV is a satellite subscription service in the U.S. that has previously had little reputation for airing its own content, unlike … Read more…
Tuesday 17th May 2011
Today was the first day of Up Fronts in New York. For those who are unaware, this is when the major US networks present their Fall schedules to the advertising community. NBC and Fox both announced their respective schedules today. Two interesting things to emerge, particularly from a UK perspective, was how high Fox’s expectations seem to be of “The X Factor” and how a failed UK comedy, “Free Agents”, has managed to find its US adaptation on NBC’s much-vaulted new schedule. Let’s firstly look at Fox, who … Read more…
Friday 15th April 2011
I am in Singapore at the moment. As a central hub to the Asian market, it’s interesting to see the growing thirst for American content coming from India, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and Singapore itself. As their smaller digital and thematic channels grow, there is an increasing demand for good quality US content. (UK content for some reason doesn’t sell as well, but that’s for another blog.) What’s even more interesting is how some of the lower-performing shows in the US do extremely well in Asia, leaving Asian … Read more…
Tuesday 5th April 2011
In the current pilot season, there is a noticeable trend that a whole spate of well known movie stars are being cast for TV series. There was a time when it was only the big screen that had stars and the small screen which made stars. Nobody knew who Jennifer Aniston was before “Friends”, nor did the public know who George Clooney was before “E.R.”. And even recently, Katherine Heigl pre-“Grey’s Anatomy” was a relative unknown, while Steve Carrell before “The Office” had only appeared as a side-show … Read more…
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