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Acquisitions slots may be few and far between on US cable networks, but coproduction opportunities are on the rise. John Hazelton spoke to the programming execs looking for the next Ab Fab
Last Mipcom, when Comedy Central acquisitions and coproduction vice president Susan Hummel was paying a routine visit to the booth of UK-based distributor Minotaur International, she came across an offbeat British series with, she says, "a sensibility that seemed to fit our sensibility."
On the lookout for programming for its new experimental late-night block, Comedy Central signed up for 15 episodes of Visual Voodoo's Travel Sick, a reality/travel/game hybrid in which host Grub Smith jets around the globe to meet a series of outrageous challenges (from shagging a watermelon in Morocco to staging a Viking funeral in Iceland).
Travel Sick is the latest in a string of quirky British shows to have found a Stateside home on Comedy Central. And the US basic cable network, which serves a male-skewed audience of younger adults, has high hopes for its most recent British buy. The show, says Hummel, promises to "add something a little bit different to our late-night block."
Even Hummel will admit, though, that finding a British show that so naturally fitted into the Comedy Central schedule was something of a fluke. Because the fact is that for Comedy Central, and for most of its US cable counterparts, such opportunistic acquisitions from the international marketplace are becoming a rarity. In an increasingly cluttered cable environment, US channels are concentrating more and more on reinforcing their own unique brands. And as a result, the channels' international acquisition and coproduction executives are refining their strategies to more precisely target programming which fits those brands.
Many long-established channels - and even some younger, still-growing networks - have already moved beyond international acquisitions and are now focusing their efforts on coproduction, the better to shape programming for their own audiences.
A&E, for one, cut back on acquiring drama programming from international sources some time ago and began instead to coproduce most of its drama projects with international - usually UK - partners. More recently, the channel decided to broaden its drama palette with some specifically American-themed movies and miniseries and take the leap into original series production.