BIG SPENDERS: Most expensive TV shows

With a £33 million budget, Babylon Berlin (9pm, Sky Atlantic) is the priciest TV series to have ever been filmed in Germany. Here, we take a look at what drives TV costs so high…

The setting Period and fantasy dramas tend to cost the most because of the scale of production. The pilot for HBO’s Prohibition drama Boardwalk Empire is one of the most expensive first episodes ever, at an estimated £13.5 million. In terms of average per-episode costs, high entrants include Game

Of Thrones (£7.5 million), Netflix’s The Crown (£9.8 million) and Steven Spielberg’s Second World War drama The Pacific (£15 million).

The cast Keeping popular actors can be a pricey business. In its middle years, ER had an average cost of £9.8 million an episode, partly due to the rising salaries of a large cast that included George Clooney (left). In its later years, Friends cost NBC (also then the US home of ER) £7.5 million an instalment, £4.5 million of which was the per-episode rate of Jennifer Aniston (far left) and the other five, who negotiated their wages as one. The music The Get Down, Netflix’s epic, 1970s New York drama about the birth of hip-hop was created by cinematic visionary Baz Luhrmann. The period detail was expensive, but what was said to set costs soaring – to an estimated

£12 million per episode – were the music rights. The future Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings series, due in 2020, could make all this look like small change. Estimates for the cost of the rights and production have gone as high as £750 million.