Financing and Distributing Television Drama: Economic Networks

Abstract

This chapter follows on from Chapter 4’s overview of current broadcasters and platforms by first explaining the networks they form to finance and distribute series. The second part goes into more detail on approaches to transnational co-production and co-financing, which have gained new momentum within Europe since the 2010s, but which practitioners also regard as a challenge for screenwriting and storytelling. This chapter also deals with opportunities and challenges by taking a closer look at the economic interplay between the commissioning broadcaster or platform and the production company. Due to the increasing number of distributors, the relationships between the two sides and the ways of financing and initiating television drama have changed. Increasingly, practitioners are calling into question the model of “100 percent financing by broadcaster”, which has dominated for years, and they are likewise beginning to scrutinise the associated “total buyout” model, where the broadcaster receives all rights from the production company and the lead creatives. New economic practices point towards an expanded agency of the production company and certain key creatives. In some cases, however, tendencies towards the studio model can be observed, when commissioners take over large parts of the production in addition to distribution.

5.1 Networks in Production and Distribution

“It’s the economy, stupid!” This famous phrase, uttered by James Carville in 1992 when he was advising Bill Clinton during his successful run for the White House, has somehow made its way into the industry discourse on quality drama from Germany. The interviewed and observed practitioners repeatedly emphasised the budget and, linked to this, dealt with economic options and networks. They explored cooperations to finance quality or high-end series—potentially very cost-intensive productions—and also addressed different distribution chains. These negotiations are clearly linked to the expansion of broadcasters and platforms described in the previous chapter. In the analysed time frame, since the year 2015, and in view of digitalisation and transnationalisation processes, a number of options have opened up for distribution via different channels and streaming services.

5.1.1 Distribution Partnerships

Digital distribution networks were something that the German television industry had already considered in the recent past. Around 2010, the two leading public broadcasting institutions, ARD and ZDF, sought to establish the online pay TV platform Germany’s Gold together with rights holders and both dependent and independent production companies (such as Bavaria Film, Brainpool and Ziegler Film). These various partners aimed to make 60 years of television as well as national and international film hits from Germany available online indefinitely (WDR mediagroup 2013). However, the Federal Cartel Office, the Bundeskartellamt, complained at the time about a distortion of competition (Sawall 2013), just as private broadcasters feared cross-subsidisation through public broadcasting fees. RTL and ProSiebenSat.1’s bid to come together to form the video portal Amazonas also failed in 2011 due to concerns of the Cartel Office (Siebenhaar 2012). Why, asks Frank Lobigs (2020, 47), do the large private and public TV companies in Germany still have no overarching streaming platforms, almost ten years later, corresponding to the alliances in France (the now no longer operating Salto) and Great Britain (BritBox)? According to Lobigs, antitrust law should be adapted “in the sense of a competition law that is more journalistically oriented instead of only economically oriented” (47, my translation). In 2023, consideration of a German “mega-platform” gained new traction, because in neighbouring Austria, Joyn, the streaming platform of the ProSiebenSat.1 Media group, also includes content from the Austrian public broadcaster ORF and other programme providers (see e.g. Krei 2023a).

Still, the observed and interviewed TV professionals negotiated current, concrete distribution alliances rather than such desired or past ones. In its distribution, the German television industry once again proved itself to be significantly intertwined: individual programme providers become explicitly dependent on others when they make up part of third-party platforms’ streaming content. WarnerTV Serie and WarnerTV Comedy (formerly TNT Serie and TNT Comedy), for example, are mainly accessible through Sky’s German streaming service WOW (formerly Sky Ticket). Distribution cooperation between platforms also occurs transnationally. For instance, the period drama Babylon Berlin (2017–), commissioned by ARD and (until season 4) Sky Deutschland, can be seen on Netflix in the US, Canada and Australia (Meza 2019). However, in 2023 (at the time of writing) season four, shown on Sky Deutschland/WOW in 2022, still has not been released in North America, ostensibly because of Netflix’s refusal to strike a fair deal. Licence sales, both in and beyond Germany, fall within the activities of distribution companies and can affect not only the commissioning broadcaster or platform but also the production company if it retains certain rights.

5.1.2 Networking Between Programme Providers

Linked to distribution, the period of research saw increased networking between programme providers on the production side. Who, exactly, is teaming up with whom to finance and distribute series? At first, there were indications of networking within media groups. The German-Romanian co-production Hackerville (2018), for example, was commissioned by TNT Serie (now WarnerTV Serie) and HBO Europe, both part of the transnational US company WarnerMedia (now Warner Bros. Discovery). While HBO previously solely focused on its own “exclusive” dramas, the “doors have since been opened”, announced Antony Root (in Root et al. 2020), vice president of HBO Europe. He made this statement at the 2020 Berlinale Series Market, and thus in a setting clearly about promotion and marketing. His positive reference to Hackerville can be countered by the fact that the thriller drama, following the investigation of a hacker attack in Romania, reached a rather small audience, despite winning the Grimme Award (one of the most prestigious German television awards) and securing secondary distribution via ARD’s online service. Therefore, Hackerville cannot necessarily be considered a forward-looking model. Moreover, for the commissioned company, UFA Fiction, the project was economically attractive only to a limited extent because of its comparatively low budget, as Jörg Winger (2018), the show’s co-creator, suggested in his presentation at the Winterclass Serial Writing and Producing industry workshop.

The intermingling of different local broadcasters of the public ARD network additionally can be viewed as networking practices within media groups. For the purpose of centralisation, Günter Struve, programme director of Das Erste (The First) from 1992 to 2008, drove the introduction of joint editorial departments for TV series in the early-evening and prime-time slots. Additionally, Degeto, ARD’s commercial subsidiary, was strengthened as a “central financing agency”, according to Bernhard Gleim (2016), former commissioning editor for NDR (part of the ARD network). In the interviews, Gleim and other ARD representatives spoke about cooperation within the federal broadcasting network. Especially when it comes to larger, more costly series productions for the joint national programme Das Erste, different local broadcasters and their respective editorial teams often band together. Sometimes, editorial department and different pots of money are combined in unusual ways. Im Angesicht des Verbrechens/In the Face of Crime (ARD et al. 2010) an ambitious and acclaimed crime drama and an early German approach to serial quality TV, for example, was financed not from series budgets but from the reallocated television film budgets of various broadcasters, according to Gebhard Henke (2018), who was still head of programming (Programmdirektor) at WDR at the time of the interview. Traditionally, pots of money and editorial departments are tied to broadcast slots, as several interviewed editors explicitly addressed. However, the tie between schedule and budget is increasingly coming undone among Germany’s public-service broadcasters.

Production and distribution cooperation can now also take place between commercial and public-service institutions, with, in principle, very different financing models and audience concepts. The cooperation between ARD and Sky Deutschland on Babylon Berlin is the best-known example, which several interviewees cited as evidence of new, more flexible network formations but also as an exceptional case. The first two seasons of the historical crime drama were released in the autumn of 2017 on the Sky 1 channel and the Sky Ticket streaming service (now WOW), and only nearly an entire year later on the national channel Das Erste and within ARD’s online service. While the alliance received considerable criticism, mostly around promoting a commercial pay TV operator using public licence fees (see e.g. Mantel 2018), Martina Zöllner (2018) from the ARD broadcaster RBB praised the cooperation as “a super construction”. She explained in our interview that one must look at the external, commercial partner and its coverage as very differentiated and always individually. Her reference to “coverage” should probably be understood as meaning that initial distribution of Babylon Berlin in cooperation with Netflix or Amazon Prime Video would have been more problematic, or at least would have required a greater economic commitment from such partners, due to their larger number of subscribers (see e.g. Bartl 2020). However, cooperation between Netflix and public broadcasters also has been tested, for example, with the television film Freaks—Du bist eine von uns / Freaks: You’re One of Us (2020), a co-production by Netflix and Das kleine Fernsehspiel (The Little Television Play), ZDF’s department for arthouse films and emerging talents. For the period crime drama Freud (2020), Netflix and the Austrian public broadcaster ORF came together. Obviously, through such alliances Netflix can reduce the costs of the content it distributes within the framework of its “glocal strategy” (Hansen 2020, 97) to, on the one hand, the local, German-speaking market and, on the other, transnationally. Since Netflix’s distribution spans different countries, the partnerships with this streaming service point in the direction of increased transnational co-production or at least co-financing, which was an important issue in the industry negotiations on financing quality TV drama.

5.2 Co-productions and Co-financing

Co-productions, through which the German television industry continues to network transnationally, can encompass various forms of cooperation: economic as well as creative; between two or many more states and its broadcasters and production companies; in Europe or beyond; between equal partners or, in the broader sense of co-financing, where responsibility for artistic content lies primarily in one country. In this last scenario, cooperation is limited to the level of financing, to the effect that the series in question usually continues to be received and marketed as a national product (Mitric 2018, 64).

Especially in the case of cost-intensive high-end or quality projects, intensified ways of co-financing and co-production are being explored, as there is a “growing need for producers to find financing outside of their national territory”, as Julia Hammett-Jamart, Petar Mitric and Eva Novrup Redvall (2018, 5) argue. Foreign partners promise further sources of funding to fill out these shows’ higher budgets and also access to funding bodies in other nations. Cultural factors can play into the economic motivations when European and German co-productions are pitted against the “big shows” (Klaus Zimmermann in Harris 2018, 321) from the US (see Drake 2018, 83–84) or when national or European history forms the narrative (as in the case of the lavish historical epic Versailles, Canal+, 2015–2018). Especially for miniseries that deal with historical events or adapt literary classics, co-productions and co-financing between public broadcasters from Europe have been not uncommon for a long time.¹ Apart from established partnerships among the German-speaking countries, however, such transnational alliances remain the great exception for German TV series production (Windeler et al. 2001, 121–122).

5.2.1 Revitalising Co-production

Both industry publications (e.g. Pickard 2019) and individual TV professionals have noted a revitalisation of European series co-production in recent years. The potential for networking between countries with different languages also seems to have increased due to greater openness to series in languages other than English. This trend, according to several interviewed and observed practitioners (e.g. Behnke 2018), is notable in various markets, including Anglo ones. The French producer Jimmy Desmarais (2016), who worked for several years on co-productions for Atlantique Productions, highlighted Carlos (Canal+/Arte/TV5 Monde, 2010) in his presentation at the European TV Drama Series Lab as a key turning point for more recent European co-production. The French-German co-production illustrates, on the one hand, transnational and trans-European content by fictionalising the life of the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, alias Carlos the Jackal, depicting relevant settings, allies and prosecutors across different countries. On the other hand, Carlos represents “amphibious” connections between cinema and television (Rohrbach 2009, first 1977) as known from earlier German productions, where a cinema film was released before a television broadcast of a longer series version of the same story. Other examples of such film-miniseries hybrids are The Baader Meinhof Komplex (ARD 2008) and Das Boot/The Boat (ARD et al. 1981/1985).

Since 2015, various other series co-productions (now more clearly oriented towards online distribution) with German participation have entered the market. In addition to the case studies considered in the interviews, Das Verschwinden/The Disappearance (ARD et al. 2017) and Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo/We Children from Zoo Station (Amazon Prime Video et al. 2021), examples include Cape Town (2016), a German–South African crime thriller without direct broadcaster participation; Deutsch-Les-Landes (MagentaTV/Amazon Studios 2018), a French-German culture-clash comedy and the first original drama from Telekom’s MagentaTV; Bad Banks (2018–2020, see Fig. 5.1), a German-Luxembourg financial thriller from ZDF and Arte; and Dignity (2019), a drama about the Christian sect Colonia Dignidad commissioned by the German platform Joyn and the Chilean TV channel Mega.

Fig. 5.1

(© ZDF/Christian Lüdeke)

Bad Banks, a German-Luxembourg financial thriller from ZDF and Arte

Co-productions, or at least co-financing, occurred in the late 2010s not only for such serials with ongoing dramatic continuity and clear quality ambitions but also for procedurals with one case per episode. Both Red Arrow Studios International, the transnational subsidiary of ProSiebenSat.1 Media, and the RTL Group pursued the goal of producing crime procedurals with mainstream and “international” appeal together with US and French partners (Meir 2019, 107). Hauke Bartel (2018), at the time of the interview head of fiction at the commercial channel Vox, spoke of certain “parameters” for co-produced procedurals such as Gone (Vox et al. 2017): “It should be very catchy […], it has to be ‘case of the week’ structure, it can’t be too top-heavy in terms of premise, so it shouldn’t have three or more hooks”.

Such procedurals can be understood as a counter-movement to the complex serial storylines of many quality dramas,² and their development arose from the needs of linear broadcasters. Several television professionals highlighted (at least in the late 2010s) an ongoing demand from advertising-financed commercial broadcasters for procedurals with one case per episode, as such shows offer more flexiblity when programming linear television. In this context, German and European TV professionals problematised a lack of supply from the US of such conventional procedurals, thus prompting their production locally.

Transatlantic co-productions taking up the guise of US procedurals not only show that trends and tendencies in US TV drama influence Germany’s television industry but also reveal that the German TV market and its needs can likewise affect US producers when looking for co-financiers and licensees. At the Winterclass workshop, Amelie von Kienlin (2017), then senior vice president for co-productions and acquisitions at Red Arrow Studios International, justified her company’s co-financing of procedurals with a US setting and US actors (instead of German-language series) by saying that the demand for non-English-language productions in the US is still very limited.

In addition to Red Arrow, other production companies with German roots have focused on English-language co-productions. Tandem Communications is one such example. The company, a production partner on the German–French-Italian-American action crime thriller series Crossing Lines (Sat.1 et al. 2013–2015), is based in Munich and has belonged to Studiocanal since 2012. However, representatives of the US television industry are said to have wondered what exactly German TV stations wanted to get out of commissioning old-fashioned US crime procedurals and then dubbing them. Behind some closed doors, according to Torsten Zarges (2018), writing for the online trade magazine DWDL.de, the expression “German stupid money” was once again heard. This catchphrase first arose in the early 2000s to describe investments in Hollywood productions from German media funds (Knorr and Schulz 2009, 270). In view of the only mediocre success of several series born from European-transatlantic co-production partnerships, German and French producers have since refrained from such English-language projects (see Meir 2019, 213).

While the crime procedurals wearing US garb often try to obscure their co-production origins, the mash-up of different countries is clearly reflected in the content of other projects. The Team (ZDF et al. 2015–2018), for example, is about European investigators cooperating across borders, and Eden (Arte/ARD/SWR 2019) fictionalises refugee movements around the year 2015 as a trans-European drama. Eden was created within the framework of the Franco-German Tandem initiative of Arte (the European public-service channel) and SWR (an ARD local broadcaster). This initiative aims to produce television films and series with “European themes” (SWR and unnamed author 2018, my translation). When speakers presented such projects at industry events, the common argument was that a co-production should be motivated not only economically but also creatively. In this context, the so-called Europudding trope functioned as a negative benchmark—looming as a kind of spectre of problematic past co-productions to be avoided.

5.2.2 “Europudding” and Other Challenges

The term “Europudding” describes aesthetically incoherent, “identity-less” television productions, especially from the past, whose mediocrity is said to have resulted from trying to satisfy multiple and sometimes competing interests. Describing past Europudding programmes in an industry talk, the producer Desmarais (2016) attested to how each broadcaster had only its domestic audience in mind and feared that its constituency would not accept characters and content beyond its respective national border. More recently, however, co-productions are displaying a greater flexibility and independence from national origins, following the observations shared in DWDL.de on the series-specific international festival Séries Mania in 2015:

TV series are increasingly created between partners from different countries who come together completely independent of their geographical origins because they believe in a certain subject and in the vision of a writer or showrunner. As a result, […] constellations can be observed that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago – without everyone wanting to see their own country and actors in the finished product. (Zarges 2015b, my translation)

Contrary to this positive assessment, however, many still have considerable reservations about co-productions in the German TV industry. The producer Ulrike Leibfried (2016) argued, by way of example, that when a great many people have a say in co-productions, it becomes difficult to pursue a clear idea. Production participants experience the notes from very different parties with divergent interests and practices as a challenge during the development and production process (Conor 2014, 71–74).³

Another challenge arises with distribution. What works transnationally or in other countries often proves difficult in the tried and tested linear structures of German television. Such was the diagnosis of Christian Friedrichs (2017), then executive producer at the production company Letterbox. Transnational co-productions, therefore, are likely to be adapted to existing schedules and schemes in German TV fiction. The six-part German-Swedish-British miniseries West of Liberty (ZDF/SVT 2019), for example, ran in its original full-length and multilingual version only on ZDF’s online service. In the linear transmission, this story of a sleazy ex-agent was shortened and dubbed as a two-parter with 90-minute episodes—a very common form in German TV fiction.

Beyond the adaptation to local TV slots and forms, individual series can “relocalise” over time, as the example of Das Boot/The Boat (Sky Deutschland 2018–) proves. The war drama, set after the plot of Wolfgang Petersen’s classic film of the same name, is a co-production in the broader sense, as the US film and television production company Sonar Entertainment (now Halcyon Studios) co-financed it. For the second season released in 2020, however, only Sky Deutschland and Bavaria Film were still involved. By the same token, eventual developments towards transnational production can arise. While the first season of Deutschland 83 (2015), for example, was a commissioned production by RTL and was primarily conceived as an image-promoting programme for this broadcaster in the German-speaking sales market, the subsequent Deutschland 86 and 89 (2018/2020) were financed by Amazon Prime Video and foreign distributors (SundanceTV and Hulu in the US; Canal+ in France; Channel 4 in the UK; Sky in Italy). A component of the budget thus came from foreign distribution.

In such mixed and co-financing, production companies potentially play an important role: they can seek out the various financiers and licensees, coordinate their coming together and initiate projects. In general, production companies have the ability to co-finance and pre-finance series, although the degree of their involvement on this front has been a matter of debate in the industry discourse under investigation. Linked to such economic questions, these debates included negotiation of the relationship between production company and commissioner.

5.3 Production Companies and Commissioners

5.3.1 A Proliferation of Commissioners

The television industry in Germany is also transforming in terms of project-specific and cross-project cooperation between production companies and commissioners. In both development and production, this cooperation is fundamentally characterised by a “divergence of goals”, according to Kerstin Fröhlich (2007, 43, my translation):

While the broadcasters pursue the goal of obtaining a high-quality, i.e. audience- and advertising-attractive programme, at low cost, the producer pursues profitability goals, i.e. the programme is to be produced using as few resources as possible and at the same time the highest possible price is to be achieved for it. (2007, 40–41, my translation)

We must add public-service broadcasters (quickly neglected in a purely media economic view) and their somewhat divergent expectations to this description. Furthermore, compared to Fröhlich’s diagnosis from 2007, other forms of commercial television (including streaming) now exist, which do not necessarily strive for a mainstream “audience- and advertising-attractive programme”. The expansion of channels and platforms has not only diversified the television series landscape in Germany but also changed the relationship between commissioners and production companies.

According to several interviewees as well as studies from media economics and sociology (e.g. Fröhlich 2010, 128; Windeler et al. 2001, 102), Germany’s television industry traditionally has been characterised by an asymmetry of power in favour of the broadcasters. Liane Jessen (2019), then head of fiction at HR, the last bastion of in-house fiction productions within the ARD network, complained about the fact that production companies adapt to their commissioners. In this capitulation and production companies’ economic focus, she saw a central cause for the mediocrity of many German TV films and series:

Producers imagine the editor, the editorial management […]. And will present well-rounded products from the outset. They won’t launch wild rock’n’roll stuff. Because that would damage their company – they’d have to lay people off. It’s logical!

That is to say, the production company delivers what the broadcaster seems to want. The number of potential commissioners and their broadcast slots for fictional series was rather small in Germany until the early 2010s. However, in the focused period under investigation (since 2015), the options have increased considerably for many production companies as well as for many freelancers (as the description of the television series landscape in Chapter 4 has already made clear). More commissioners and distributors are available, especially for the series segment defined as “high-end”. But quality dramas with cross-episode and multi-strand plots require a particularly high amount of screenwriting work and thus also usually demand a larger upfront investment by the production companies.

5.3.2 Financing Screenwriting

The economic discourse of the TV professionals often revolved around the question of who finances the script development phase, at what intensity and from when until when. The first step of script preparation is to develop an idea to the point where it is ready to present to a potential commissioner. In the case of a series, this usually involves writing a pitch paper or a somewhat longer series concept, if not a “series bible”: working documents that describe characters, their relationships and central settings with varying levels of detail (Zabel 2009, 69). In some cases, initial scripts for individual episodes are prepared in advance, before a broadcaster or platform is contacted. In addition to the development contract between the commissioner and production company, which can follow the first concept and other presentation materials, independent development is conceivable. In this scenario, the production company or the writers, or both, continue to develop scripts without having a broadcaster or platform on board. According to the German “star writer” Annette Hess (2019), Constantin Film, for example, financed her development work together with five up-and-coming writers for the drama Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, without a channel or platform yet secured. “200,000 euros, 150,000 […] to get a 20 million contract from Amazon Prime” is how Hess (2019) outlined the budgetary framework. Zarges (2017a) notes that, for German production companies, minimum guarantees on later distribution revenues make it easier to budget for development projects—even if no broadcaster is involved yet. However, only large production companies can afford to finance elaborate development before a project is greenlit.

Generally, funding of the screenwriting stage is strongly project dependent. On the one hand, financial conditions can differ from show to show; on the other, the economic success of current projects impacts future developments. To a great extent, production companies use profits from their last productions to finance early concept and screenwriting work for new ones. Here it becomes clear that initial screenwriting is, economically speaking, closely related to production and distribution. In general, the way screenplay work is financed is embedded in basic production and distribution patterns. Especially the tendency towards the “total buyout” model for most German TV dramas stood, for a long time, in the way of the independent development of and stronger financial commitment from production companies.

5.3.3 Moving Away from the “total buyout” Model

Series production in Germany traditionally has been dominated by 100% financing by a broadcaster and the associated “total buyout” model, according to which the commissioner receives all rights (see e.g. Kauschke and Klugius 2000, 179). But, as with many other facets of the television landscape, the ways in which production companies and programme providers cooperate with one another are increasingly in flux. The case of the hoped-for quality TV drama, especially, demands other financing models and problematises existing, traditional production structures. Criticism of 100% funding has been going on for years: many in the industry see it as the central cause of the power asymmetry that favours the broadcasters (see Fröhlich 2010, 128). The total buyout model is often associated with lower innovation and quality, since producers have little interest in the success of a series financed in this way (Fröhlich 2007, 43). The retention of exploitation rights by the production company could contribute to increasing innovation, Fröhlich believes. In the interviews and at the observed industry workshops, similar arguments and demands for more responsibility and scope for production companies became visible. Joachim Kosack (2019) even described a “culture war” between commissioners and producers and highlighted the central question pushed by the Produzentenallianz, the alliance of German film and television producers: “How can producers better invest by also participating entrepreneurially in formats, if these are later a success?”.

Especially in the segment of quality or high-end series, we can observe a move away from purely commissioned production, not least because of the increased budgets series require, which a single broadcaster or platform often cannot or does not want to handle alone. In the US, “deficit financing” (Meir 2019, 113) has been common for years for larger TV drama projects, where the commissioning broadcaster covers only part of the costs and the co-financing production company hopes to be able to recoup its expenses through sales in other markets.

5.3.4 Mixed and Co-financing

At the industry workshops, the observed practitioners repeatedly negotiated mixed and co-financing and explored sources of funding. The German television industry, it was noted several times, has some catching up to do in this respect. Due to the tendency towards 100% financing by a commissioner, production companies have rarely found it necessary to look for further investors, noted producer Christian Friedrichs (2017) in his talk at the 2017 Winterclass. Moreover, according to Friedrichs, commercial companies in Germany are not all that used to giving “private equity” (i.e. off-market equity) to series. With the television industry's diversification, however, financing channels and their associated networks have likewise become more diverse. Jonas Anschütz (2015), then vice president of Red Arrow, presented an overview of various possible funding sources that can be interrelated: in addition to the contribution of the television broadcaster or platform, they can include, among others, the equity of the production company, income generated from product placement or crowdfunding and the minimum guarantee from world distribution, as well as “soft money”, such as tax benefits and subsidies from media funding agencies. Film and media funds, as already discussed in Chapter 4, expanded their field of activity to include TV drama during the period under study. As a rule, they do not subsidise projects according to the total buyout model, as such bodies instead hope to participate in licence sales and receive a return on the subsidies, which are given as loans. For producers, potential subsidies provide a further reason to move away from purely commissioned production.

Through the involvement of film and media funds, and more generally through the combination of different pots of money, series financing is approaching that of cinema. In his study on the pan-European distribution and production company Studiocanal, Christopher Meir (2019, 113) identifies how financing and sales structures from the independent film sector are being adapted for series, similar to what the Swedish British producer Zygi Kamasa (in Barraclough 2017) argued in the industry magazine Variety some years ago:

The film producers who have a lot of experience at putting together independent films – a patchwork of financing with gaps and tax credits, and two or three European partners – are extremely well set up to assemble television shows because TV is becoming very much like that.

In view of cooperative financing, broadcasters’ influence may potentially decrease. At the industry workshops, at least some producers and creatives expressed a corresponding hope that this would be the case. However, the participation of a broadcaster or a platform is still central—as producer Klaus Zimmermann emphasised with regard to co-productions and licence sales: “It’s almost impossible to sell a show that you have co-produced without a broadcaster later on” (in Harris 2018, 320).

A counter-example—and a clear exception in German TV series—is the six-part English-language crime miniseries Cape Town, set in the South African city, which Annette Reeker, a scriptwriter, producer and managing director of the company all-in-production, shot “at her own initiative” (according to Zarges 2015c, my translation, published in DWDL.de). In Germany, Cape Town ran only on the crime and thriller pay TV channel 13th Street (available through a Sky subscription) and thus missed large parts of the German public. Licence payments from the German pay TV sector are low, as Friedrichs (2017) noted. The second season of Cape Town, reportedly already developed in a writers’ room (Zarges 2015c), did not go ahead.

Production companies and broadcasters are often closely interwoven, as Chapter 4’s examination of institutions in the local television industry has already brought to light. Broadcasters tend to generate content with the production companies affiliated with them and within their own media group (Windeler et al. 2001, 105). Some television professionals have criticised this tendency. Among them, for example, is the scriptwriter Martin Behnke (2018), who expressed the following regarding the script development for the political drama Die Stadt und die Macht/The City and the Power (ARD/NDR/Degeto 2016):

The problem is, of course, that Studio Hamburg, Real Film […] are also a subsidiary of NDR and thus of ARD. That means they are also quite dependent on the broadcaster. […] Now I have to be careful, I’m probably telling a lot of internal information that I’m not even allowed to tell.

Behnke’s final remark makes it clear that production companies’ dependency on broadcasters can be quite a sensitive issue. In this respect, it became apparent that I mostly received only certain, filtered information on this topic through the interviews. Although it was often difficult to get information regarding broadcasters’ dominion, it is thus safe to say that commissioning companies continue to be extremely powerful actors in series financing and distribution, despite the greater flexibility that comes with mixed and co-financing. Commissioners’ continued—and in some cases even increased—importance is also visible when looking at subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) providers, who in some cases tend towards purely commissioned production, that is, “total buyout”, or even approach the studio model.

5.3.5 Trends Towards the Studio Model

Individual providers seek “exclusive” content, especially when it comes to prestigious quality drama, and in this pursuit, they rely on the total buyout model and, to some extent, in-house production. Purely commissioned production is sometimes seen as an easier and faster way to finance than putting together different funders, which requires a lot of time and effort (e.g. Lückerath 2020b). Practitioners sometimes even diagnosed tendencies towards the studio system, whereby programme providers take over large parts of the production in addition to distribution. In an industry workshop, producer and creative Jörg Winger (2019) spoke of the “silo model”, in which all phases of series production remain in one house. He cited this as a central trend alongside mixed financing. TV professionals particularly associated the provider Netflix with approaches to the total buyout model and the studio system. As a rule, Netflix releases its series in all its territories around the same time and often exclusively on its own platform. In this context, production companies and authors usually cede all rights, which mostly is a problematic scenario for them.

Occasionally, Netflix binds creatives exclusively to itself, as in the case of Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar (see Fig. 5.2), the head writer and director, respectively, of both Dark (2017–2020) and 1899 (2022). Friese (2019) explained her and Odar’s situation—the first European “overall deal” (Niemeier 2018)—to me while exhibiting her connection by wearing a hoodie with a Netflix logo:

This is ominously called a “multi-year deal” and nobody talks about how many years it is. But it’s usually always two to three years. And that just means […] all new ideas we have to pitch to Netflix first, and we’re not allowed to do them anywhere else within that period of time. In cinema we can do what we want, but we don’t have time to do anything else at all—that’s why it doesn’t happen.

Fig. 5.2

(© Adrien Lachappelle/Netflix)

Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, the creators of Dark and 1899, at a Netflix panel in Paris, 2016

This arrangement indicates a regimentation of creativity due to the multi-year commitment, high production output and vague framework conditions, which once again point in the direction of the studio model. When I then asked Friese what role the production company behind Dark, Wiedemann and Berg, played under the “overall deal” conditions, she answered with a laugh that “time was up”, as if it were a sensitive issue, and then immediately followed up with:

They are also really good friends of ours and we have […] now simply […] taken a path together, in which we do it together, but everyone does what they do best. And that it is simply clear that the operative business is in better hands with us, because we simply work on it every day. […] That still means that certain production services are done by Wiedemann & Berg. But it’s just the way it is, especially when you’re in the second season. So many things are automatic anyway, and we have a producer employed by Wiedemann & Berg, Lars [Gmehling], who always sits here.

This interview excerpt clearly shows the difficulty of fathoming the networks at play and related “sensitive” subjects, such as possible push back from the production companies, in more detail. Often, I received information from interviewees only in an appropriately diplomatic form and embedded in an “industrial performance” (Caldwell 2004, 186), characterised by self-interest and the cultivation of contacts. At the very least, it can be noted that in the case of the Netflix show Dark, changed cooperation models in German TV series production are becoming apparent. In particular, the position of the more or less independent production companies is potentially weakened. Creatives may become employees, or at least exclusively obligated parties, of providers, thus expanding cooperation arrangements across individual project networks. This trend may particularly affect writers, who traditionally work freelance, and their collaboration with supervising editors.⁴

Beyond Germany, streaming providers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video pose a threat to established financing methods, networks and processes in the television and film industry. It is obvious that related changes in funding and cooperation in project networks are hardly limited to a national context; rather, they are embedded in transnational developments. The transnationalisation of the local television (series) industry—a trend promoted by the new actor Netflix—was, in general, an important topic in the analysed industry discourse on German quality drama. The following chapter takes a closer look at negotiations surrounding exports in TV fiction and the possible transnationalisation of practitioners, project networks and screenwriting, and it also addresses local dimensions and particularities.

Notes

• 1. For earlier public co-productions in Europe, see e.g. Die Geschwister Oppermann /The Oppermanns (ZDF et al., 1982), Berlin Alexanderplatz (ARD/WDR/RAI, 1980) and the various adventure miniseries by ZDF with the former French public broadcaster ORTF, such as Der Seewolf/The Sea Wolf (1971).

• 2. Similar counter-movements also arose in other local and temporal contexts. According to Robert J. Thompson (2007, xix), “procedural dramatic franchises” such as Law & Order (NBC, 1996–2004) were the US networks’ answer to quality series like The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007).

• 3. Chapter 8, on production cultures in screenwriting, and Sect. 3.3, on commissioning editors in networks, address the corresponding critique of bureaucracy and polyphony in more detail.

• 4. Section 3.3 discusses this cooperation between writers and commissioning editors in greater detail.