Financing and Distributing Television Drama: Economic Networks

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-productionCo-production and co-financingCo-production, 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\“Total buyout\” model” 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 modelStudio model can be observed, when commissioners take over large parts of the production in addition to distribution.