Yahoo News BBC Natural History Boss On Combatting “Market Saturation” With ‘Game Of Thrones’-Style Narrative Series ‘Kingdom’
“The market is saturated and no one would deny that,” the BBC’s natural history boss admitted today, as she explained how she is combatting this with Game of Thrones-style series Kingdom.
Sreya Biswas said the “pretty bad downturn” has hit “expensive” natural history landmarks as much as other genres in production ecosystems around the world.
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Commissioners and program makers therefore need to keep thinking about how to reinvent the wheel, she added at the Creative Cities Convention.
“Production costs are huge so we need to think about what a landmark is, how we want to make it and how to interrogate new technology and stories,” said Biswas. “We need to be clever about how we think about what to make next.”
Coupled with the downturn and rising costs, Biswas pointed to the issue of natural history lacking ‘bingeability’, which can be a turn off for the streamers or VoD platforms like BBC iPlayer.
“People don’t watch multiple episodes of natural history in the way you would watch a drama,” she said. “So although they have an enormous shelf life, they drop off quite quickly because audiences will say, ‘I’ll come back to this in a few months’.”
In a bid to combat this, Biswas talked up the BBC’s upcoming narrative natural history series Kingdom from the Natural History Unit.
She labeled Kingdom a “Game of Thrones for African wildlife” and said the show being filmed across four years in Zambia will be replete with “narrative cliffhangers,” showcasing families of leopards, hyenas, wild dogs and lions all vying for dominance in a remote valley.
“This feels exciting and hopefully will be a turn of the dial for a landmark,” said Biswas, who was promoted to her current role two years ago. “Hopefully it will move the genre on.”
Biswas was speaking at Creative Cities on the day that the BBC unveiled a trio of new natural history series on insects, British wildlife and killer whales. Earlier today, Grant Mansfield, the boss of natural history maker Plimsoll, talked up opportunities for British producers in America despite the slowdown.
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