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| (Image Source: Forbes/Netflix) |
The success of the French crime series "Lupin", riding on the heels of the Spanish show "Money Heist", may hint at a waning of US dominance on the small screen as ambitious European, Latin American and South Korean players kick down the door on streaming platforms. But what pushed them abroad to bet on TV shows having mainly relied on sport and cinema in the past are the increase in internet speed, the rise of on-demand television and the example given by American pay TV channels led by HBO.
"Spiral" (originally "Engrenagues"), "Carlos" or "Braquo", all produced for Canal+, highlighted a growing global appetite for non-anglophone television shows and series. They were followed by shows from public broadcasting channels such as the 2010-2013 Danish political phenomenon "Borgen" and, from 2010, the British title "Sherlock" which despite being made in English has a particularly non-American flavor. University of Bologna's Luca Barra, who co-authored a study for European television shows, stated that improved standards had been driven by pay TV stations trying to differentiate themselves from public broadcasters by coming up with the kind of premium content that viewers have used to see only on the big screen.
According to Barra, channels noticed that their premium output was not just a distinctive feature of every national market, but something that had an appeal in other markets. This change in mentality has also favored the development of transnational production companies to cope with significantly increasing budgets. At the same time, the explosion in the number of channels and platforms has generated an appetite for content never seen before while redefining the notion of success. The emergence of international platforms led by Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ has played a role in driving such appetite. Bolsting its international appeal, Netflix has also set up subtitling for all its productions and dubbing for many of them, allowing a non-English series like "Lupin" to top global viewing rankings.
To gain a foothold overseas, US platforms produced local content for several countries through production houses being situated within these territories. In South Korea and now in Europe, internet video on-demand services are also required to contribute financially to the audiovisual sector in the countries where such is established. In this new landscape of television production, Federation Entertainment founder and president Pascal Breton acknowledged that Americans "remain very powerful" but "there is a real rebalancing" which is expected to accelerate. Following the footsteps of English-language productions, Pascal also said that shows are more and more often devoted to "subjects and narratives which are more international". For University of Wisconsin professor Jonathan Grey, non-US production companies have also integrated narrative structures that can be expected abroad, all the way to the United States.
In "Lupin", the Louvre museum acts as a hook but, for Breton, the success of the series can also be explained by its staging. It looks a bit like the films of Luc Besson, who Breton recognized as the only one in French cinema who understood the international market. In fact, several of the director's former collaborators were involved in the production of the series. On the other hand, Federation Group's Cheyenne Federation is currently working on a series around the Notre Dame fire slated to be shown in 2022 with a budget equivalent to that of "Lupin" according to the producer.
