As the Director of Global Drama at Fremantle Media, Sarah Doole seeks to invest and bring the very best drama to the international marketplace. She is responsible for the acquisition of all scripted content, from in-house producers and third party drama partners, through development investment, distribution deals and co-production partnerships.
Sarah also works with in-house producers, indie producers, writers, directors and owners of IP, to create and develop drama and comedy that will rate in its domestic market as well as providing an on-going revenue stream through commercial exploitation internationally, whether tape sales, digital activity or scripted remakes.
Sarah began her career at Yorkshire Television as a researcher, producer and Head of Development, and as Director of Enterprises at Yorkshire Tyne Tees she oversaw the worldwide exploitation of shows such as Heartbeat, Darling Buds of May, Emmerdale and The Tube. She set up the international operations for The Family Channel (now ABC Family) while in the US and returned to the UK as Creative Director for Commercial Ventures, brand managing programming ranging from Emmerdale to Popstars. She joined BBC Worldwide‘s joint venture DVD arm – 2Entertain – as Head of Independents, before moving to the Indie Unit at BBCW in 2007.
Partial List of Development Credits
MIPCOM: FremantleMedia’s Drama Head on Developing Scripted Internationally (Q&A) | The Hollywood Reporter | Oct 6, 2015
RTL’s FremantleMedia has been on a shopping spree lately, scooping up production houses in territories around the world. The company best known as the reality production powerhouse behind big global brands such as the Idol, X-Factor and Got Talent franchises brought on Sarah Doole in 2014 with the directive to dramatically boost their scripted slate. With an eye on expanding European dramas, Doole acquired Italian production company Wildside in August, a majority stake in France’s newly-created Frontaram just last month, and a 25 percent stake in the U.K.’s Corona TV in January.
Doole spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the company’s drama expansion plans and the challenges of running a global business.
You’re launching sales on Modus at MIPCOM, which is Swedish language. Do you think presenting Swedish to international buyers will be a challenge?
We’re in a really good place here at Fremantle, because we kind of pioneered selling non-English-speaking dramas in the last two years. We don’t really even think now what language it is in. If it’s a great story, we think we can sell it. We’ve had absolutely enormous success with Deutchland 83, our German-speaking show, it’s basically sold everywhere. It has opened the door to European programming. I was in L.A. five weeks ago and we went round to lots of the channels and network executives, and at least five of them said to me, ‘Why didn’t you bring us Deutschland 83?’ And I said, ‘Because a year ago you wouldn’t have even considered it.’ Which is the truth. They wouldn’t have considered a German show. Now [the cable networks] are on the lookout, really looking for standout addictive programming. It has opened their eyes to what audiences are keen to see. The same way the British audience five years ago wouldn’t have watched subtitles, and now it’s absolutely commonplace.
Both Modus and the second show you are launching, Capital, are based on books. Was this a conscious choice?
A book obviously has brand recognition, and people have already used their imagination if they’ve read that as a literary work so for the viewer you’re already halfway there. The real skill is that you can’t disappoint people. The adaptation has to be even better than how your imagination works for the books. You need it to feel very film-ic, and that’s why Modus works brilliantly. When you see it you’re entering a visual universe. And this is going to sound really trite, but TV is a visual medium and I think we forget that sometimes. The great thing about Modus, if you turn off the subtitles you will still understand the story.
The shows use local actors that are not well-known names around the world. Does this help or hurt?
We’ve done research on this last year. Big stars do help to sell it internationally, but for viewers it’s about the character on screen. And viewers care less and less about seeing a big Hollywood name. They would rather see a great actor bringing that character to live. And that’s one of the appeals of European drama. For example in Modus, [lead actress] Melinda Kinneman very rarely does TV. She’s a big theatrical actress, so even for Scandi audiences she’s not that well known on TV. For a European audience it doesn’t matter. In fact it adds to it.
There are some 400 dramas on screens now. Is there an overload of product or are we heading that way?
It’s a really, really exciting time. I think viewers are hungrier than they have ever been, they are willing to dedicate a lot of time to watching shows. What will change is that in the old days you delivered a show week by week, but we know a lot of our customers want delivery of the whole series on day 1. People are playing it out in all sorts of different ways. So we have to be able to supply virtually day and date now on our big dramas and sometimes that’s a challenge. You might be making an international version for various reasons, and that ability to feed the market on the same day that it goes out in its home territory is really important. It’s a challenge for our producers and our behind-the-scenes teams.
What then is the biggest challenge on the global marketplace for day-and-date delivery?
Sometimes on a drama you might have a different cut and that might be for music clearance reasons. Or, for instance, if you’re selling a BBC show, a BBC hour runs at 60 minutes of content because they don’t have any ad breaks. There isn’t a channel around the world that takes a 60 minute hour so you have to cut out 10 minutes for an international version. It’s not for any editorial reason, just format length version. That’s a real challenge because viewers will find that somewhere on the internet, by hook or by crook. So we have to be rigorous and make sure that we can deliver, and that takes a lot of planning. That’s a really crucial bit for drama. As a trend though that’s very exciting, because that means that viewers are hungry for those stories and it’s our job to fulfill that hunger and that we can sell it. It means that we are pre-selling dramas a lot more, and we are taking dramas out initially to the market at an earlier stage than we did before so that broadcasters, if they’re interested, can have that slot in mind to coincide with the home broadcaster. So I think that’s another trend.
What are your plans with the latest Fremantle acquisition of Frontaram in France?
It’s really early days with those guys, but we’re really excited because France is a massive market. Obviously we’ve done really well with drama in France, and we have a big sale that we’ll be announcing soon. So to have a production entity in France was always our goal for many reasons. There are fantastic stories coming out of France, they have that film-ic tradition when it comes to telling stories on TV, they’ve got great writers, and I think to have those guys as part of our global drama family is really exciting. We’ve got great production in Germany with UFA, with Wildside in Italy. We’re also looking at Spain currently.
So you will continue to grow your global drama footprint? What is next on the agenda?
The next territory I’m really excited about it Australia, because I think we’ve got some fantastic drama coming out of there already. We make Wentworth, which has sold to 89 countries. And the brilliant thing is that we remade it ourselves in Germany and Italy. To have that coming through the family is really exciting. Jo Porter, who runs our Australian team, has one project in particular that I’m really excited about. It’s a really iconic Australian story that we are starting pre-sales at MIPCOM and I think it’s very co-produceable. We’ve already had interest even though we haven’t finished writing the bible on it. Australia is ripe because of its heritage of great writers, almost all of the Australian acting talent is already in Hollywood, and also great directors coming out of Australia. If we can marry all of these things and bring them home, I think we can then tell a story that resonates around the world.
How do you manage the global business with production arms across the world?
We have spent the last year developing a pipeline that runs at 20 pages. That’s all our shows around the world in development across the world in drama . We are tracking those on a daily basis. We talk to our producers around the world, sometimes daily, and I’ve traveled an awful lot in the last nine months, because for me it is about face-to-face interaction. We go to Berlin at least once a month, Scandi at least monthly or every two weeks, and we will be doing the same for France and for Italy. Three or four times a year all [teams] meet in the same room and that’s really exciting because we have 25 of our top producers together. We have co-production cluster groups, as well as co-development between Denmark and Germany, even one that is really wacky between Germany and Australia. So we do that each MIP and then we run a big meeting where they all come to London for 2 days and that’s about business, ideas, creativity, and just getting them to connect in a space that’s outside their daily work. When you get those creatives in a room it is so exciting because anything can happen.
Sarah Doole Brings Drama to Unscripted Giant FremantleMedia | Variety | Feb 27, 2015
Global production and distribution company FremantleMedia is best known for unscripted shows like “The X Factor” and the “Got Talent” franchise, but it’s increasingly turning the spotlight on dramas, like zombie thriller “The Returned,” which debuts in the U.S. on A&E in March.
The show is one of the first results of a shift in strategy at FremantleMedia, where Sarah Doole, who has been director of global drama since February 2014, was hired by CEO Cecile Frot-Coutaz with the goal of raising its scripted-programming revenue share to 50% from 30% in five years.
Two key challenges that Doole, the former head of drama at BBC Worldwide, faces: Drama takes longer to get to market than reality, and competition for top writing talent is fierce.
“If you look at the U.K. market for drama, for example, there are probably five or six top British writers, and they are booked for the next three or four years,” she says. “In the U.S., there is a bigger writing pool, but availability is pretty much the same.”
FremantleMedia’s primary target is the U.S. A few months after Doole’s hiring, the company tapped Craig Cegielski, a former Lionsgate TV executive, as exec VP of scripted programming and development to assist in the assault on the market.
But rather than trying to sell American shows to Americans, Doole says, Fremantle wants to develop shows with a “European voice.”
Cegielski hired Carlton Cuse and Raelle Tucker to reanimate “The Returned,” based on French show “Les Revenants,” for which Fremantle has rights. Next up for Cegielski is Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of his novel “American Gods,” which Starz is backing.
The objective is to develop shows that FremantleMedia’s international distribution team can present to the global market at an early stage, greenlit via pre-sales, co-production or deficit financing.
It just sold “Deutschland 83,” produced by its German subsid UFA, to SundanceTV. It’s the first German-language drama to air on a U.S. net.
“It doesn’t matter what language it’s in,” Doole says. “If it is a great story, it is going to travel, either as a tape sale or a remake or a re-version.”