Is Sky TV ready for another renaissance?
Now Game of Thrones is over, the pressure is on for the next water-cooler drama, says Christopher Williams
On a brisk spring evening, the Tower of London was lit up with flame. Sky had seized the castle to host the starry world premiere of the fifth season of its blockbusting fantasy saga, Game of Thrones, projecting a giant fire-breathing dragon on to the ancient walls.
The lavish event four years ago signified a change in Britain’s dominant pay-tv operator. Where once almost all its promotional muscle went into sport, subscribers were now demanding big dramas, and there was none bigger than Game of Thrones. The series had become the linchpin of Sky Atlantic and the company’s response to the rise of Netflix.
The premium drama channel was launched just four years earlier and had already overtaken Hollywood films in the list of Sky attractions most cited by customers as a reason to subscribe, behind only live sport.
The Tower buzzed with celebrities and press, confirming that Sky had a genuine cultural phenomenon on its hands. It was a moment of triumph, but also of frustration. Game of Thrones, alas, belonged to the US broadcaster HBO; Sky was merely the UK retailer.
Four years later, and Game of Thrones is still Sky’s biggest drama to date. But, of course, that series is now over. What’s more, the company’s
exclusive contract with HBO ends next year and HBO’S parent company, AT&T – a fierce rival of Sky’s new owner, Comcast – is planning to launch its own streaming service.
Other shows are being bought up by streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon. So the pressure is on Sky to develop its own hit shows.
It’s track record in this department is patchy, to say the least. Aiming fairly and squarely at the populist end of the broadcasting spectrum, Sky has specialised in a mixture of outlandish soaps, such as Dream Team, a drama serial set in and around a fictional football club, which first aired in 1997, and titillating factual programmes.
Even when it has aimed upmarket, the results have been mixed. Fortitude, a psychological thriller set in the Arctic Circle and starring Christopher Eccleston, Michael Gambon and Stanley Tucci, was the broadcaster’s first attempt to produce a landmark drama and, at £30million for the first series in 2015, cost four times as much as any previous in-house drama. But ratings quickly tumbled – from 722,000 for the first episode to 561,000 for the second – and the series failed to make the impact of programmes such as Netflix’s House of Cards or The Crown, let alone Game of Thrones.
Even worse was Britannia,a transparent attempt to meet the appetite for swords and sorcery created by Game of Thrones, which attracted only 248,000 live viewers for its first episode and was panned by critics.
Other shows have enjoyed more success. Glossy Cote d’azur serial Riviera, starring Julia Stiles, was mauled by critics but attracted an impressive 2.3million viewers per episode in its first season, after on-demand viewing was included, and began a second season last week. Last year’s Save Me, starring Lennie James and Suranne Jones, was garlanded with praise, and Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, recently won two Baftas for Best Mini-series and Best Leading Actor.
Even so, senior executives admit something about Sky, as an organisation, has historically impeded its ability to make successful dramas. In the late Nineties and early 2000s, Rupert Murdoch focused all the company’s money and effort on a battle with its pay-tv rival Ondigital. Original programme-making was low down on its list of priorities. And, even when this battle was won, executives were not convinced that drama was something they should be doing. The company should focus, they argued, on its established strengths in sports rights, marketing and technology.
Sophie Turner Laing, Sky’s programming chief, became so frustrated that she even had a T-shirt printed that said “Protect the Content Budget” and gave it to Jeremy Darroch, the current chief executive, who was then chief financial officer.
The other factor inconsistent with original programme-making was Sky’s subscription model itself.
“Creating a company where the marketing and retail people can sit side by side as equals with creative people is really difficult,” says one senior executive. “If you think about how you run a subscription business like Sky, it is all numbers. It’s daily sales reports, analytical updates. You ask, ‘Why didn’t this or that initiative work?’ and there are usually clear answers. It’s never just a punt.
“Content is different. It’s about trusting someone and giving them a load of money and them coming back three years later with something that is not what they said, and you cross your fingers that it works.”
Another agrees: “[Programmemaking is] not like us taking a view on something more mechanical like broadband penetration rates or broadband speeds or shipping boxes to people’s homes. What happens in that industry is you sign up for scripts, then it takes two years, which is a long time, before it gets on air. You don’t know what else will be on screen two years from now and whether it will still be relevant.”
It is for these reasons that Sky has traditionally focused on buying up US programmes. As well as Game of Thrones, Sky has been the exclusive home in the UK of True Detective, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire and Billions, to name but a few. But the march of streaming services and the rash of US programme-makers who have merged with Sky’s rivals mean that that model is becoming untenable.
Fortunately, Comcast, the vast American cable empire that paid £30billion for Sky in an extraordinary head-to-head auction against Disney last year, also owns Hollywood giant Nbcuniversal, maker of a string of global hits including Friends and The Fast and the Furious film franchise.
Sky now has a stablemate that has a proven track record in programming. It is also no longer an independent public company whose spending is being scrutinised by shareholders.
Inside Sky, the shelter of Comcast has been greeted as a boost to the long battle to conquer programme making, as the company still lacks confidence in its creative abilities.
“That’s where they can help us,” said
one senior Sky executive. In practice, the deal will mean that, over time, Nbcuniversal’s British operation will be integrated into Sky’s west London campus, providing an injection of creative staff and new thinking.
Sky, which under Murdoch control defined itself as an outsider in the British television industry, will become intertwined with one of the world’s top programme-makers at a time when drama is more important than ever to its success. Audiences for Premier League football, the bedrock of its business, appear to be in decline but the appetite for box sets and bingeing grows every year.
In the next few months, Sky will air four-part miniseries Catherine the Great (another HBO co-production) starring Dame Helen Mirren, and continue its hunt for a stand-alone hit by beginning production on Intergalactic, an action-packed sci-fi drama, set in the 23rd century.
For Brian Roberts, the Comcast boss who has staked £30billion and his own record on Sky, failure is not an option: “We don’t know we are right in our judgment. But we’ve financed it and we’ve paid for it. Now it’s all about what can we do from here. Time will judge whether we were right or wrong.”
The Battle for Sky: The Murdochs, Disney, Comcast and the Future of Entertainment by Christopher Williams is published by Bloomsbury on May 30 and available to pre-order now. The author is The
Telegraph’s deputy business editor