Transnational co-production,multiplatform television and My Brilliant Friend

Introduction

This article case studies Rai/HBO co-production L’Amica Geniale/My Brilliant Friend (2018–) so as to investigate newer approaches to ‘transnational co-production’ in high-end TV drama. As defined and examined by Michele Hilmes (2014) ‘transnational co-production’ is rooted in a longstanding tradition of ‘international co-production’, the television industry’s preferred label for TV programmes whose financing and commissioning pairs networks and producers from (usually) two different countries. While this term remains relevant, Hilmes uses ‘transnational co-production’ to acknowledge the increased complexity of transnational partnerships and negotiations that underpins today’s co-produced dramas. ‘Transnational co-production’, Hilmes argues, is a ‘practice that more and more frequently partners public sector broadcasters with independents and larger commercial companies from two or more nations’ (p. 12). It is this increased complexity and diversity of co-production partnerships in TV drama that makes ‘transnational co-production’ the preferred term for this article.

Even though international co-production has a lengthy history in TV drama, transnational co-production is in the ascendancy today. The context for this is television’s burgeoning ‘multiplatform’ era, as one in which broadcast, cable/satellite and internet-only TV services co-exist (Dunleavy, 2018). Within this context, ‘internet-distributed television’ (Lotz, 2016), hereafter referred to as ‘IDTV’, is encouraging and reshaping the possibilities for transnational co-production. Already a pervasive option for the consumption of new TV dramas, the proliferation of internet platforms is reducing some longstanding obstacles to transnational co-production by accelerating the circulation of new TV shows and extending their availability to international audiences. In the presence of converging objectives as well as competition between broadcast, cable/satellite and internet-only networks, transnational drama co-productions, as Hilmes predicted in 2014, are increasingly arising from a process in which networks and production companies domiciled in different, possibly distant territories, work together to develop, finance and create a new show.

‘Premium’ (or subscription-funded) TV networks – as national, transnational and/or multi-national services in the multiplatform era – have built their subscriber bases through the offer of original as well as acquired programmes, with new high-end TV dramas remaining crucial to the audience allure and profitability of the world’s leading examples. However, as the volume of TV services has expanded, and with it the intensity of inter-network competition to buy or originate high-end drama, so has the strategic value of a network’s investment in this genre. In the United States, for example, the additional demand for new dramas has fuelled ‘peak TV’, this term acknowledging that the annual number of US fiction shows in production is historically unprecedented and still rising. American ‘peak TV’, instigated and sustained by the additional commissioning of non-broadcast networks (beginning with cable TV and more recently extending to internet networks) is indicated in the exponential increase in the annual total of dramas and comedies in production – 182 in 2002, 349 in 2013, and 487 in 2017 (Rodriguez, 2018). For the year 2019, the estimated US total for fiction productions was 532 shows (Koblin, 2020). As a broader institutional response to the proliferation of services that characterises multiplatform television, ‘peak TV’ is now driving the expansion of non-US TV drama, important to which is the increasing prevalence of transnational co-productions, including a notable diversity of non-English language programmes.

While transnational co-production was identified in 2014 by Hilmes, today’s burgeoning multiplatform landscape is imbuing it with further potentials, with two of the most recent co-production strategies being identified and examined in this article. An important one is what I term ‘cross-platform co-production’, a collaboration that pairs national broadcasters with transnational or multi-national premium networks, usually involving additional partners. L’Amica Geniale/My Brilliant Friend (hereafter referred to as MBF) is a collaboration between the Italian public broadcaster, Rai, the US-based premium network, HBO, and three production companies – the Rome-based Wildside and Fandango, and Belgium-based Umedia – with Fremantle providing additional support as MBF’s international distributor. With this line-up of network and non-network partners, MBF provides a revealing demonstration of the creative and industrial innovation that ‘cross-platform co-production’ is bringing to television. Arguing that MBF exemplifies the cultural and economic benefits of transnational co-production in TV’s multiplatform era, the article necessarily emphasises this drama’s institutional and industrial contexts over analysis of the still unfolding MBF text. Focussing on the first season of MBF episodes, which debuted internationally in November 2018, the article examines this drama’s origination as a literary adaptation, its genesis as a ‘cross-platform’ co-production, and its exemplification of changing drama commissioning strategies for Rai and HBO.

Transnational and cultural flows in TV programming

Miyase Christensen (2013: 2405) observes that ‘transnationalism’ is a ‘specific way of looking at globalization, transborder phenomena, and transnational media in social sciences’. ‘Transnational TV drama’ refers to programmes intended and designed for distribution to foreign markets, this objective also supporting the higher budgets increasingly characteristic of today’s TV dramas.

Theories of transnational and cultural flow have closely reflected the capacities of television as it evolved from a national to increasingly transnational medium. Emerging in television’s broadcast-only era, the transnational flow of TV programming was first conceived in terms of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Schiller, 1976; Tunstall, 1977), which accentuated a ‘one-way’ flow of TV products from ‘cultural centres’, notably the United States and United Kingdom, to the rest of the world. Until the 1960s, in the context of television’s still fledgling status in many countries, the international demand for quality programmes from the English-speaking production powerhouses of the United States and United Kingdom, was sustained at the expense of providing domestic productions in higher-cost genres (Steemers, 2004: 1). As national TV markets matured and domestic production flourished, an initially heavy reliance on TV imports was reduced by the increased availability of domestic programming, the expansion of which was also encouraged by the imposition of content regulations.

The expansion of multi-channel television in the 1980s, important to which was the maturation of cable TV services and the uploading of television signals to satellites, incited new theories of transnational TV flow. One is ‘cultural proximity’ (Straubhaar, 2007), the conviction that TV ‘audiences are attracted to cultural similarity or proximity’ (p. 91), and, as such, disposed to prefer TV shows originating within their own countries or, in categories where domestic content is unavailable, from culturally similar markets. Another is ‘contra-flow’ (Sinclair et al., 1996). Responding to the transnational circulation and success of TV exports from a wider range of countries, including those once regarded as ‘cultural peripheries’, ‘contra-flow’ recognises that international TV flow is not confined to a one-way movement from perceived ‘cultural centres’ to ‘peripheries’ but instead is multi-directional.

While none of the above theories of transnational and cultural flow is necessarily outmoded, none can effectively account for the multi-directional flows for newly released TV programmes that are being produced in the multiplatform era, nor can they quite explain the cultural status of a new TV drama created through transnational co-production. Because its development process has paired the US-based HBO with the Italian Rai, MBF is not straightforwardly an Italian TV drama, even if this process began as a project that Fandango would produce for Rai alone. Moreover, its status as a transnational co-production entails a non-traditional and accelerated pattern of transnational flow for MBF. MBF’s combining of Rai and HBO with distributor Fremantle, which together enable complementary forms of international distribution, allowed for the first season to reach 56 countries within weeks of initial release on Rai and HBO (Fremantle, 2018) and to be sold to a total of 150 countries by April 2019 (MIA Market, 2019).

Multiplatform television and its industry

‘Multiplatform television’ describes an environment in which newer internet-only networks co-exist with older broadcast and cable/satellite providers. Two interrelated developments have combined to distinguish ‘multiplatform television’ from earlier eras for the medium and both have informed MBF’s creation.

The first is technological and enabled by ‘platformisation’, a broader phenomenon that acknowledges the ‘rise of the [internet] as the dominant infrastructural and/or economic model’ (Evens and Donders, 2018: 1) for media and ICT industries. The broader effort of television networks to exploit the potentials of internet distribution is fuelling a proliferation of services, or ‘portals’, as Amanda Lotz (2017) calls them. As platformisation continues along this path, with most broadcast and cable networks now augmenting their linear services with IDTV portals, a foreseeable consequence is the gradual redefinition of television as an internet-distributed medium.

Facilitated by platformisation, the second development is industrial. As noted above, IDTV is becoming a pervasive delivery mode for broadcast and cable/satellite networks which complements their linear channels while simultaneously contributing to the platformisation of the television medium. The addition of IDTV portals to older broadcast and cable/satellite networks is enabling a ‘bi-platform’ (linear and online) mode of delivery for their programmes. While linear channels still favour the release of new episodes on a weekly basis, IDTV portals are giving broadcast and cable/satellite networks more options for the launch of new programmes and these so-called ‘legacy’ TV services are themselves experimenting with the online release of whole seasons for selected shows.

As a transnational co-production developed for simultaneous release on the internet and linear platforms of its network investors, MBF is a product of this multiplatform TV industry. Although MBF qualifies as ‘public service drama’ on the basis of Rai’s early commitment to developing it, the drama is also a commercial production, in view of the imperatives of its other investors. Emblematic of its intention to exploit the opportunities for transnational co-production in the multiplatform era is the sizeable line-up of institutional partners supporting MBF. As suggested, this partnership comprises TV networks (Rai, HBO, and initially Tim Vision, an Italian IDTV service), production companies (Wildside, Fandango, and UMedia, with Italian production development company, The Apartment, adding additional support from 2020), and UK-based international distributor, Fremantle. That MBF has been able to attract finance from such a diverse range of domestic and foreign partners suggests that while the multiplatform era began, and has been perceived of, as a context of inter-platform competition between ‘legacy’ TV networks and internet-only ‘disrupters’, it is now evolving, encouraged by the conditions outlined here, into one with the potential for increasing collaboration between broadcast and premium networks and converging commissioning objectives for networks of such different types.

Literary adaptation, Italian TV drama and the rise of multi-season serials

Literary adaptation has been integral to the traditions and trajectory of Italian TV drama from its inception. Milly Buonanno (2012) describes how Italian TV drama began as sceneggiati, or stories ‘told in instalments and based on an already published work of fiction’ (p. 16). While sceneggiati started as a form of filmed theatre or, as Buonanno terms it, ‘theatre in the studio’ (p. 16), successive Rai-commissioned mini-series established and sustained a strand of ‘filmed sceneggiati’ (pp. 37–38) from the 1970s. Introducing strategies that would much later be exemplified by MBF and other Italian TV dramas, these mini-series involved not only collaborations between Italian film and TV creative personnel, but also co-productions with US or British TV networks. As leading Italian TV dramas of their era, these mini-series were characterised by ‘[s]ubstantial budgets, high production values, renowned authors [and] a stellar cast’ (Buonanno, 2012: 38).

Italian TV drama today is a diverse category whose programmes are considered ‘among the most prestigious’ (Barra and Scaglione, 2015: 66) of domestic television forms. Rai has dominated the creation of TV drama, commissioning around 70 per cent of annual drama output (Vivarelli, 2017). Yet Italian TV drama has expanded and further diversified since the country’s commercial networks – most notably, the leading commercial broadcaster, Mediaset (from the late 1980s) and premium network, Sky Italia (from the late 2000s) – began to regularly commission TV dramas (Barra and Scaglioni, 2015). Although their domestic fiction output takes a range of forms, as public service-oriented, advertiser-funded and subscription-based networks respectively, Rai, Mediaset and Sky Italia have sought to differentiate themselves within the national market through the development of distinctive strands of high-end TV drama. Consistent with its established traditions and the continuing expectations attached to it as Italy’s public service broadcaster, Rai’s high-end drama has favoured two ongoing strands which Luca Barra and Massimo Scaglioni describe respectively as ‘hagiography’ and ‘social drama’ (pp. 67–68), as opposed to Mediaset which preferred instead ‘American-style’ crime series (pp. 68–71). Sky Italia, taking advantage of the greater content freedoms that distinguish premium networks from free-to-air broadcasters, has introduced a third strand of dramas whose deviant central male characters has earned them the label ‘bad guys’ (pp. 71–72). ¹

Notwithstanding the longstanding importance of literary adaptation to Italian and other national TV drama paradigms, new dramas are far more often originated for television than adapted from literature. Yet, with MBF flanked by other recent examples, including HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019), Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), CBC/Netflix’s Anne with An E (2017–2019) and BBC/HBO’s His Dark Materials (2019–), literary adaptation is gaining ground in the multiplatform era. Encouraging the use of literature as a source for new TV drama productions has been television’s rising preference for drama in serial, as distinct from series, form. Even though the mini-series remains ideal for adaptations involving a single novel, a striking feature of dramas that are both adapted from literature and produced for TV’s multiplatform era has been the deployment of entire novel series to create multi-season serials. Especially for literature that is itself serial in form and whose popularity has been demonstrated in international book sales, novel series offer a compelling source for adaptation as high-end TV drama. This is because successful novel series not only instil a degree of confidence in a new drama’s potential for audience appeal, but also bring with them the welcome reassurance of seasonal longevity for the completed show.

While serialisation gained new traction within international high-end TV drama as multi-channel competition intensified in the 1990s, this rarely yielded fully serialised programmes. This possibility was limited by the continuing commercial strength of the ‘procedural’ drama series, whose deployment of episodic formulas and resolving stories remained ideal for linear broadcast channels, especially those funded by advertisers. Serial dramas have always been important to broadcast networks, with continuing soap operas being the oldest and most prevalent of television’s serial forms. Still, the regular production of serials that are both high-end and multi-season is a relatively recent phenomenon, and this serial form became industrially and culturally more pervasive only with the rise of premium television (Dunleavy, 2018). With HBO originals providing a flow of internationally influential examples from 2000, high-end serial dramas, emphatically multi-season examples, have proved highly compatible with the business model of premium TV networks because they help increase subscriber numbers and reduce churn. Yet high-end, multi-season serial dramas have posed challenges for most national broadcasters, not least of which is the high cost of achieving the conceptual, narrative and aesthetic sophistication that have characterised the successful examples named above. The trajectory of Italian TV drama is highly consistent with the above pattern for high-end serials internationally. Although Italian TV drama has included serials in mini-series and soap opera forms, Barra and Scaglioni acknowledge that ‘Italy has no tradition of making serials, especially long ones’ (2015: 66).

Turning the ‘Neapolitan Novels’ into long-format TV drama

MBF adapts the internationally popular ‘Neapolitan Novel’ series authored by Elena Ferrante, the nom de plume used by the novels’ author. The central story told in the four novels foregrounds and critiques the life-long friendship, which started in their childhood in 1950s Naples, between two intellectually gifted women. While MBF’s first season debuted in late 2018 and the second in 2020, Rai/HBO’s intention is to produce four MBF seasons, one for each of the novels that comprise Ferrante’s series.

The international popularity of her novels has seen Ferrante celebrated as ‘the most successful Italian novelist in years’ (Momigliano, 2019) and the most internationally acclaimed Italian female writer. By November 2018, as MBF’s first season was about to air, the Neapolitan novels had sold more than 10 million copies, a third in the English-language (Gamerman, 2018). While it is not at all surprising that this total has increased since MBF’s release, the international appeal of this four-novel series was evident by 2016 when Time magazine included Ferrante in its top-100 list of most influential people, describing her as ‘the bard of Naples’ (Groff, 2016). For these reasons, the Neapolitan novels constituted an exceptional candidate for adaptation as long-form television.

Still, Ferrante seemed less certain than others closely involved in the process that her Neapolitan novels should be adapted for television. As MBF launched, a point long after she had completed her own episode scripts as a member of the first season’s writing team, Ferrante (2018) reflected on the difficulties of adapting her story:

I feel the need for scenes that in my story would have been superfluous. I write dialogue that the tone of my text wouldn’t tolerate. I often seem to be collaborating on the ‘remaking’ of my novel, with writing that I would never have used…Yet this is just the beginning, a preliminary goal for writing that, on the one hand, reduces the book to its skeleton, and on the other still displays the features of every written word…In the [television] version, everything, absolutely everything, will have to have a precise aspect: the streets, the church, the tunnel, the houses, the rooms, a classroom, the desks. And everyone, absolutely everyone, will have to have a particular body.

Three decisions helped to mitigate Ferrante’s initial uncertainties about how the specific challenges of this adaptation would be resolved. One was that MBF’s first season was co-written and directed entirely by the revered Italian filmmaker, Saverio Costanzo, Ferrante’s nominated choice. Another was her creative contribution to the first season as a member of the writing team and consultant on the scripts. A third involved the framing of the MBF’s narrative perspective; a distinctive feature of the novels because the story of Elena (Lenù) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo is self-reflexively narrated by the former in defiance of the latter. While this tension is ongoing in the novels, the TV adaptation handles it differently. This self-reflexive frame for the screen story is established in MBF’s opening scene in which, on receiving news that her lifelong friend has gone missing, Lenù (Elisabetta De Palo), now in her 60s, begins to type their story which then unfolds as an extended flashback.

Within Rai Fiction’s drama commissions, one of two ongoing major strands has been labelled ‘socially committed’ drama (Barra and Scaglioni, 2015: 68). Explaining why this ‘social drama’ has been such a pervasive and popular strand for Rai Fiction, Barra and Scaglioni (2015: 68) argue that:

[Italian television] uses social drama to unravel the story of the nation. Italy is a country in somewhat strenuous pursuit of a shared narrative, one that can fill the voids – and the dark corners – of an identity that is permanently a work in progress and continually called into question. It is the country of the mafias but also of the ‘reluctant heroes’, martyred simply because they refuse to compromise over values and duties…Social drama’s popularity reflects the incessant need to find a shared story to present the nation, in the absence of a solid shared past.

While a family’s poverty is seen to determine how vulnerable it will be to Camorra brutality (Alfredo Peluso [Gennaro Canonico] is nearly beaten to death for publicly protesting the Carracci’s theft of his carpentry business), young women are even more vulnerable. As a child in episode one (‘Le Bambole/The Dolls’), young Lila (Ludovica Nasti) is bullied and slapped by a teenage Stefano Carracci (Kristijan Di Giacomo) for outwitting his younger brother, Alfonso (Valerio Laviano Saggese), at school. As teenagers themselves by episode three (‘Le Metamorfosi/The Metamorphoses’), Lenù (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace) watch in horror as their schoolmate Ada Cappuccio (Ulrike Migliaresi) is forced into a car, driven away and raped by Marcello (Elvis Esposito) and Michele (Alessio Gallo) Solara. On Ada’s return to the neighbourhood, her cut and swollen face testifying to her struggle to resist them, the Solara siblings add insult to injury by publicly accusing Ada of ‘whoring around the neighbourhood’. Precisely as intended, this manoeuvre compels Ada’s now dishonoured brother, Antonio (Domenico Cuomo), to lunge at the Solaras, to which they respond by beating him unconscious in front of the assembled community who dare not intervene. As these examples suggest, the Solaras’ thefts of property, beatings and rapes, as with the more restrained bullying of their contemporary, Stefano Carracci (Giovanni Amura), proceed unchallenged.

Embodied by the Solaras and Carracci families, MBF’s deployment of the Camorra is highly consistent with Buonanno’s sense that the Mafia, both in Italian fiction and society, remains ‘the great national obsession’ (2012: 59). While MBF uses the Camorra to foreground the differences of power and wealth that determine the lives of individuals and families, its narrative focus, emulating that of the novels, is the difficult, diverging trajectories of Lila and Lenù. MBF foregrounds the experiences of Lenù and Lila as gifted protagonists who struggle to fulfil their potentials in a world hostile to female achievement. Lila and Lenù are drawn together by their passion for learning and shared imperative to use education as a route to escape the pre-determined lives of girls and women in this neighbourhood. However, their relationship is irrevocably changed and ultimately damaged after Lila is unable to continue her schooling and instead obliged to capitulate to the Camorra; a process that begins with her marriage to her one-time enemy, Stefano Carracci.

High-end drama and new approaches to transnational co-production

International co-production has been a regular option within TV drama since the 1970s, at which point the creative ambition and production costs were beginning to push the limits of available national resources. Ib Bondebjerg asserts that such co-productions ‘tend to be a collaboration on a financial technical level, [and] only rarely on the creative level of story, style and content’ (2016: 8). While this recognises the prevailing motivation for co-productions as financial, foreign partner networks are more likely to involve themselves in creative input in cases where the level of foreign investment constitutes a significant proportion of the total cost (see Steemers, 2004: 112–115). Even though the norm for international co-production has long been a bilateral agreement between two investing networks located in different countries, transnational co-production offers new ways to connect nationally produced TV dramas with foreign financing and international audiences.

Transnational co-production in high-end TV drama has increased of late for several reasons. First is that while national broadcasters have always commissioned TV drama, they have become more receptive to co-production in the context of sharply rising costs at drama’s high-end. Maureen Ryan and Cynthia Littleton’s analysis (2017) of rising budgets at the high-end of the production value spectrum suggests that the highest costs are being paid by US premium networks, with examples in HBO’s Game of Thrones, at around US$15 million for each of the Season 8 episodes and Netflix’s first season of The Crown, at more than US$10 million per episode. The increased level of funding required to create high-end TV dramas that can co-exist with examples like these, makes it more vital for national broadcasters to pursue co-production deals to share the burden of cost. Second is that transnational co-productions directly advance the progress of US-based premium networks which operate, or seek to operate, a multi-national business, indicatively Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus. For networks like these, the offer of non-US dramas, including non-English language productions, is a means to increase the cultural diversity of their total drama offering and with this, their penetration and profitability in non-US territories.

While the above two factors are increasingly global in their repercussions for high-end TV drama, transnational co-production has gained new stimulus in Europe in the context of some additional factors. One is enhanced European Commission (EC) financing for European film and television projects, administered through the EC’s Creative Europe scheme whose Media Sub-Programme allocates funding to these productions. In May 2018, Creative Europe’s Media Sub-Programme allocated a total of €5 million to 58 television productions. As one of the applicants for Creative Europe funding in this round, MBF was one of the two TV drama projects awarded €1 million, the highest figure to be allocated to any project (Creative Europe Desk UK, 2018). The other is the extension of European content regulations to include non-broadcast networks which operate but are not necessarily domiciled in Europe. The EC retains a longstanding expectation that European broadcasters devote 50 per cent of their airtime to European-produced, including nationally-produced, content. But seeking to better balance the content expectations for national broadcasters and the increased penetration of video-on-demand networks (including premium examples), a 2018 revision of the EC’s Audio Visual and Media Services (AVMS) rules now requires providers to ensure that 30 per cent of their content is European-produced (see Audio Visual and Media Services Directive, 28 November 2018: 13.1).

Writing about transnational co-production at the outset of today’s multiplatform era, Michele Hilmes (2014) observes a tendency for drama co-productions to more routinely involve creative collaboration between partner networks and producers than was possible in past decades. Anticipating the arrangements and possibilities for collaboration that have facilitated MBF (examined in the next section of this article), Hilmes (2014: 12) argues that:

Transnational co-production in the current era includes not just co-financing or pre-sale of distribution rights…it also involves a creative partnership in which national interests must be combined and reconciled, differing audience tastes considered, and, often, the collision of public service goals with commercial expectations negotiated.

One can be termed the ‘direct commissioning’ of a new drama by a single foreign-domiciled, yet multi-national or transnational network, in partnership with one or more production companies operating within a given national market. This ‘direct commissioning’ approach is exemplified by Netflix originals, Dark (2017–2020), The Rain (2018–2020) and Home for Christmas (2019–), which were not only produced in Germany, Denmark and Norway respectively, but also filmed, respectively, in the German, Danish and Norwegian languages. Other examples include the Indian Hindi-speaking drama, The Family Man (2019–), and Lord of the Rings (Forthcoming), currently in production in New Zealand, both commissioned by Amazon Prime. Even though ‘direct commissioning’ simulates TV drama’s traditional relationship between a given national TV network as ‘buyer’ and the one or more domestic indie companies who act as ‘producer’, it also fulfils one of the traditional purposes of TV drama co-production by connecting foreign finance with domestic creative industries. What is new in the multiplatform era and re-defines ‘direct commissioning’ in the transnational environment for which high-end TV drama is now created, is that this approach to co-production is motivated by international rather than national outcomes.

This ‘direct commissioning’ differs radically from earlier approaches to drama creation and co-production because it bypasses the necessity for a national TV network to be involved. Instead, as the above examples demonstrate, ‘direct commissioning’ allows dramas to be developed and produced by local independent companies under contract to a single multi-national or transnational network. As such, a ‘direct commissioning’ approach to the creation of transnational TV drama reduces the diversity of network investors with a cultural stake in the emerging production. Specifically, it avoids the problem afflicting some of TV drama’s earlier international co-productions, of the necessity to negotiate the cultural specificity of an emerging drama between national and foreign networks who tend to bring different imperatives to this. Netflix’s expectations of Dark and The Rain, for example, eclipse the issue of their popularity within Germany and Denmark as the countries in which these shows were respectively produced. Instead the priority for Netflix is the allure of these dramas across this network’s near-global array of territories.

The other form of co-production can be termed ‘cross-platform co-production’ and examples of it, in addition to MBF, include Babylon Berlin (ARD/Sky Deutschland, 2017–), Anne with An E (CBC/Netflix, 2017–2019), His Dark Materials (BBC/HBO, 2019–) and Normal People (BBC/Hulu, 2020), among others. ‘Cross-platform co-production’ deviates from earlier approaches to international co-production because it involves a partnership between a national broadcaster and a premium network. While the former is more often a public than a commercial broadcaster, the latter is either a multi-national example (such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, or HBO) or a transnational example (such as Canal + and Sky Atlantic).

Although broadcast TV networks are effectively ‘bi-platform’ services in the sense that they combine linear with IDTV services and delivery, their national function brings with it a region-specific cultural and/or commercial impetus for their commissioning of high-end drama. The domestic orientation of broadcast networks can be contrasted with the shared imperative of multi-national and transnational premium networks to use high-end shows to increase, extend and maintain international subscriber bases. Accordingly, the term ‘cross-platform co-production’ foregrounds the cultural and economic distinctions between broadcast and premium network partners as opposed to their organisational or technological characteristics. As such, ‘cross-platform co-production’ recognises the alignment and necessary reconciliation of the different national and international objectives that these partnerships entail. While commercial as well as public broadcasters are involved in ‘cross-platform co-production’, the above examples suggest an emerging, perhaps unexpected, commonality of interests between public broadcasters and multi-national premium networks in the creation of new high-end drama.

Traditional approaches to transnational drama co-production continue into the contemporary multiplatform era. However the newer strategies that this article labels ‘cross-platform co-production’ and ‘direct commissioning’ – especially because both approaches tend to be deployed to create high-end dramas produced outside of the United States, including an increasing proportion of non-English language productions – are enabling an increased cultural and/or linguistic diversity for new dramas produced for international distribution. Observing a recent ‘surge’ in the cultural diversity of dramas arising from international co-production deals and, as such, devised to function in multiple markets, Timothy Havens (2018) hypothesises that these shows are also manifesting an unusual degree of cultural specificity or ‘localism’. Proffering the label ‘conspicuous localism’ to categorise them, Havens sees this as evident in their ‘cinematography, storylines, and languages’ and the product of their design for a ‘cosmopolitan international audience’ (2018). Important to MBF’s own attempt to target a ‘cosmopolitan international audience’ is that, in its aesthetics, storytelling and use of the Neapolitan dialect as well as the Italian language, the series is imbued with an ‘art television’ sensibility. Features like these are keyed to resonate with HBO’s international subscribers while simultaneously reflecting the public service values and aesthetic traditions of Rai.

Common to both ‘direct commissioning’ and ‘cross-platform co-production’ is their capacity to facilitate an immediacy of international circulation, non-English-language productions, and the more overt form of ‘localism’ asserted by Havens (2018). Yet whereas ‘direct commissioning’ involves creative and financial negotiations between local producers and what is usually one multi-national or transnational premium network, unique to ‘cross-platform co-production’ is the necessity to reconcile the cultural requirements of national broadcasters (including public service examples) with the commercial imperatives of internationally-oriented premium networks.

The collaboration between Rai and HBO on MBF

Of primary interest in this section is My Brilliant Friend’s cultivation of a co-production relationship between US premium cable pioneer HBO and Italian public broadcaster Rai. We can begin to explain this by underlining their longstanding individual interests in the facilitation of distinctive high-end drama. However, given the emergence of other co-productions between British or European broadcasters and US-domiciled premium networks, Rai and HBO’s collaboration on MBF also suggests that the opportunities and challenges the multiplatform era has created for all TV providers is encouraging an unexpected alignment of financial and cultural interests between national public broadcasters and leading international premium networks. Within Europe, public broadcasters have featured more strongly in transnational co-production partnerships than European commercial broadcasters because the public networks continue to dominate drama commissioning at the national level.

The possibilities for creative collaboration between Italian producers and HBO were opened by The Young Pope (2016), which, produced by the Rome-based Wildside, initiated a co-production relationship with HBO. The success of The Young Pope spawned a sequel called The New Pope (2020–), expanding HBO’s existing collaborative relationship with Wildside. The involvement of Wildside, as MBF’s second main production company, and of its parent company Fremantle, whose role in the partnership is to facilitate MBF’s international sales, was facilitated by Lorenzo Mieli. As co-founder of Wildside in 2009 and CEO of Fremantle Italia since 2010, Mieli has been pivotal to forging relationships between Italian drama producers and leading international networks. This perception is supported by Mieli’s 2019 appointment as CEO of Fremantle’s The Apartment, a company established to specialise in the development of Italian-domiciled but internationally-oriented fiction productions.

The MBF project began in 2014 when Domenico Procacci, founding producer at Rome-based production company, Fandango, secured the screen rights and started developing the project after obtaining the commissioning interest of Rai’s Eleonora Andreatta. Although one can only speculate as to whether or not Rai would still have commissioned MBF without the involvement of HBO, the fact that Fandango and Rai Fiction spent almost a year developing the project as a new drama for Rai Uno before actually discussing it with HBO, suggests this might be the case (Roxborough, 2018). Linking The Young Pope directly with MBF, and allowing the former to prepare the way for the latter, both productions have involved HBO, Fremantle and Wildside working together, with Lorenzo Mieli included in both executive producer teams. HBO’s co-production involvement in MBF was solicited by Mieli, whose experience with The Young Pope and other international productions was important not only in securing HBO’s commitment but also reassuring Rai that co-producing with HBO could progress its own objectives for drama.

By the time an international co-production deal was completed between HBO and Rai, both networks expected MBF to work well for them, despite respective differences in terms of brand identity, economic model and core audience. Foregrounding the significance for both networks of the demonstrated popularity of the Neapolitan novels, Mieli underlines that ‘both understood that there were enough elements in these novels to make them a big success [for] Rai Uno and HBO’ (cited in Vivarelli, 2017). Alluding to the key distinction of the Neapolitan novels, Andreatta describes them as ‘one of the most powerful stories of female friendship’ available and thus ‘felt very strongly’ about commissioning MBF in view of its perceived position within ‘the realm of what European public service television does’ (cited in Vivarelli, 2017).

In the dramas Rai is originating and in its willingness to partner with US-based premium networks, the Italian public broadcaster has repositioned itself to exploit rather than become undermined by the increased transnationalism that is broadly characteristic of TV’s multiplatform era. As suggested, Rai commissions roughly 70 per cent of Italian TV fiction (Vivarelli, 2017). But its current collaborations with HBO and Netflix evidence Rai Fiction’s new conception of its public service role in the area of drama. As Andreatta explains:

Rai, like other European public service broadcasters, has had to rethink its role, faced with a changing market which is increasingly global. It has had to think about its identity as a great content producer. And that identity is to focus on Italian creativity, Italian culture, history, and tradition. (cited in Vivarelli, 2017)

While MBF was developed as a major new production for Rai, the drama became an international co-production when HBO agreed to co-commission it. HBO’s co-commissioning of MBF shifted its creative objectives from the initial plan for Fandango to produce the series for Rai’s national audience, to its development as a transnational co-production destined for international distribution. While Rai/HBO co-investment helps to facilitate the substantial costs of the series’ period verisimilitude, the combination of Italian national broadcaster Rai, a prestige timeslot on Rai Uno, the international penetration of HBO-branded services and HBO-licensed outlets, as well as the global reach of international distributor, Fremantle, ensures MBF’s availability on broadcast channels, premium cable channels and/or IDTV portals as it debuts in different national markets.

Aesthetic, cultural and linguistic distinctions for MBF

Its combination of Italian and American investors has helped facilitate MBF as an aesthetically and narratively sophisticated period drama. HBO’s involvement brings with it the pursuit of an aesthetic ambition underpinned by higher budgets for TV drama, a commitment that has seen it consistently invest more per episode than other US-based networks and raise expectations of quality for TV drama-producing networks both within and beyond the United States. While this strategy began with The Sopranos (1999–2007) (Edgerton, 2008: 8) and continued in Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014) (McCabe, 2013: 186), new records were set by the final season of Game of Thrones, with each episode averaging US$15 million (Ryan and Littleton, 2017). Even though MBF’s first season production cost has not yet been revealed, its budget requirements as an ambitious period drama that combines studio shooting with purpose-built outdoor sets and locations make it a close counterpart, in terms of likely cost, to Rai’s 2019 mini-series The Name of the Rose, whose 8 hour-long episodes reputedly cost around €26 million (De Marco, 2018).

In addition to the creative ambition facilitated by high-end budgets, HBO has valued original dramas whose stories and characters are new to television and take a particular ‘point of view’ (Albrecht, cited in Dunleavy, 2018: 106). As a TV drama whose aesthetic distinction includes a notable commitment to period verisimilitude (exemplified in the production’s painstaking reconstruction of Rione Luzzatti), whose narrative focus on female empowerment in 1950s Naples is new territory for TV drama, and whose exploration of the ambiguities that attend an enduring friendship combine to constitute a distinctive ‘point of view’, MBF is highly consistent with the set of attributes HBO has prized in its original dramas.

Given the imperative for MBF to succeed with its existing subscribers and ideally generate new ones, HBO also hired American writer-producer, Jennifer Schuur. Explaining why this was important to both Rai and HBO, HBO’s Associate Head of Drama Francesca Orsi underlines the perception shared by MBF’s co-production partners that ‘having [the] point of view that an American TV writer brings, that sensibility’ (cited in Owen, 2018) would help to maximise the accessibility of MBF’s story and perspective to an international audience. Alongside Rai and HBO’s collaboration on such key decisions as where to shoot MBF and in what language, Schuur’s contributions as a member of MBF’s writing and executive producer teams evidence HBO’s creative collaboration with its Italian partners.

Robin Nelson was among the first to register high-end drama’s ‘aspiration to cinema’ (2007: 110). Michael Newman and Elena Levine describe this change as a process of ‘cinematization’, by which it has become possible for ‘certain kinds of television…[to be] aligned with movies and the experience of movies’ (2012: 5). MBF, whose budgets were boosted by foreign investment, demonstrates the influence of cinema on TV drama. Saverio Costanzo, MBF’s co-writer, director and effective ‘showrunner’, describes the drama as a ‘film’ and not as ‘television’, inferring that MBF’s visual style bears the influence of Italian neo-realist cinema (La Porte, 2018).

Registering the influence of Italian neo-realism on MBF’s mise-en-scène, Costanzo acknowledges that research for the production involved close reference to Italian neo-realist films. Aligning with ideals that were characteristic of Italian neo-realist cinema, this research sought to maximise the perceived authenticity of MBF’s visualisation of urban Naples in the 1950s (La Porte, 2018). This perceived authenticity for MBF was equally important for HBO (Mieli, cited in Owen, 2018). Yet since HBO has also sought to brand itself as superior to traditional television and combined ‘Not TV’, cinema and authorship discourses in so doing, aesthetic or narrative connections between MBF and neo-realist cinema traditions are key to strengthening MBF’s appeal for HBO’s traditional subscriber base. It is by no means uncommon for TV drama showrunners to accentuate the influence of cinema and downplay television. However, the influence of Italian neo-realism that Costanzo foregrounds has also been acknowledged in international reviews of the show, one of which asserts MBF’s ‘homage to the canon of Italian cinema’ (Stanford et al., 2018). MBF is ultimately TV drama and not cinema. Still, foregrounding a disposition within international cinema circles to embrace the series as cinema, MBF’s Italian debut occurred at the Venice Film Festival in September 2018, with the first two episodes receiving a 10-minute standing ovation (Bromwich, 2018).

MBF is among the most expensive screen projects ever produced in Italy; its cost reflecting its scale and the various demands of its period story and setting. While MBF’s first season was shot mostly in studios, the location scenes pivotal to its setting in urban post-war Naples were filmed in ‘a 215,000 square foot set on which the crew built 14 apartment exteriors, a church, and a tunnel’ (Gamerman, 2018). This set recreated Rione Luzzatti, the real-world location where Ferrante’s fictional lead characters grew into adulthood (Bromwich, 2018). For these and other reasons, Andreatta considers MBF to be ‘probably the most important international production’ Rai has undertaken to date (C21 Media, 2019).

While HBO’s The Young Pope and its successor The New Pope are both produced in English language, MBF is further distinguished as the first entirely non-English language drama that HBO has commissioned (Orsi, cited in Owen, 2018). MBF’s most obvious risk-taking in respect of the language spoken by its characters, a risk embraced by both HBO and Rai, is the use of an archaic Neapolitan dialect that few Italian viewers speak or understand (Mieli, cited in Owen, 2018). Highlighting its importance to the MBF story, Rai’s Andreatta explains that:

Neapolitan language is part of the concept of the story. [Lenù and Lila] come from this very poor neighbourhood where people are not able to speak Italian. This story is about…female emancipation through culture and through education. The fact that one of the two, Elena, the writer who tells us the story, is able to stay in school and learn to speak properly in Italian is something important. So the dialect was part of the story and HBO really wanted this authenticity. That was the element that gave us the possibility to do it. (C21 Media, 2018)

As an overt example of MBF’s cultural specificity, its Neapolitan language had significant repercussions for the selection and preparation of the show’s core cast, which included recruiting actors from the Campania region where the Neapolitan dialect is still spoken. Costanzo recalls that around 9000 auditions were held over 9 months to find the four women who would play Elena and Lila as children and teenagers (cited in Pickard, 2018). With the use of untrained actors in the core roles, another repercussion was the need to devote considerable pre-production time to making sure that these young, inexperienced actors were able to meet MBF’s performance challenges.

As HBO’s first foray into a non-English-language original drama, MBF’s shooting in the Neapolitan and Italian languages testifies to a new acceptance on the part of HBO’s LA-based senior executives that subtitled dramas, although still a risk, are less of a deterrent for English-speaking audiences in the multiplatform era than in earlier periods. There is also a broader and rising perception within the TV drama industry, evident in the offer by leading premium networks of an increasing array of non-English-language dramas, that the ability to stream TV shows may be fuelling the erosion of a longstanding resistance by English-speaking viewers to subtitled dramas (Di Maio, cited in Owen, 2018).

Conclusions

L’Amica Geniale/My Brilliant Friend is emblematic of new possibilities for TV drama to be transnational, because it is conceived as such, to acquire the higher levels of investment necessary for high-end productions from multiple sources, and involve co-production deals between national broadcasters and multi-national or transnational premium networks. While this article also identifies the approach of ‘direct commissioning’, MBF is indicative of an equally revolutionary ‘cross-platform’ approach to transnational co-production in the multiplatform era. Nationally-produced yet with foreign investment, and with the potential for creative input from foreign partners, these dramas are finding ways to reconcile cultural specificity with international resonance in the kinds of stories they construct and in the strategies through which these stories unfold.

As an indicative example of cultural specificity in transnational drama and the objectives that are making this form of ‘localism’ profitable in the multiplatform era, MBF also reveals a new degree of alignment between the cultural objectives of national public broadcasters and the commercial imperatives of international premium networks. As MBF demonstrates, TV drama stands to gain, rather than necessarily to lose, the capacity to pursue cultural specificity from a co-production partnership between these different types of network. For public broadcasters, the pursuit of cultural specificity in TV drama provides a means to reflect the national identity required as part of a public service remit. While cultural specificity and originality are both expected qualities for ‘public service drama’ (working together to justify the use of public funding), these same characteristics now appear to have a commercial value to international premium networks seeking to distinguish themselves on the basis of original dramas as well as to extend their businesses across multiple national markets. As HBO was the first US premium network to discover, cultural specificity and conceptual novelty in the drama that networks commission or co-commission is strategically valuable because it helps attract the attention and sustain the loyalty of the educated professionals who have been most receptive to subscription-funded television to date.

It may seem surprising that Havens’ descriptor, ‘conspicuous localism’, derives from dramas produced transnationally and designed to appeal to an international audience, especially since, in earlier decades of television, international co-production held the potential to reduce or compromise the cultural specificity of a TV drama. As a production filmed in an archaic Neapolitan dialect because the cultural authenticity of its unique story required it, MBF exemplifies the potentials of ‘conspicuous localism’ in the contexts of transnational co-production and multiplatform television. Yet, this more pronounced ‘localism’, Havens suggests, is indebted to the targeting of a ‘cosmopolitan international audience’ (2018). In the contexts examined in this article, with new strategies exemplified by MBF as a ‘cross-platform co-production’, the multiplatform era and within it the use of internet portals by national broadcasters and premium networks alike have made it more possible than ever to reach such an audience.