TRENDWATCH
028
2019
ushered in significant shifts in the industry, from major mergers and acquisitions to the launch of new heavy-hitters in the SVOD space, such as Apple TV+ and Disney+. It was also a year of further debate and renewed urgency tied to questions surrounding climate change and systemic abuses, as reflected in nature docuseries such as Our Planet and minis with #MeToo connections, including Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland. In this fractured, polarized and fast-moving economic, political and social climate, it’s easy to assume everything’s fair game and rulebooks are a thing of the past. And yet the non-fiction industry continues to operate according to certain patterns of demand, with producers and commissioners alike finding themselves responding to and fostering the trends we can expect to see flourishing in 2020. PRESTIGE PLAYS Outside of genre, scale and prestige status have become major considerations for commissioners, with a need for big, branddefining projects on any given slate. Eli Lehrer, EVP of programming and general manager at A+E’s History, points to the advantage of having a “clearly defined lane” that’s obvious just from the cable net’s name, but even within history programming Lehrer tells Realscreen that he’s following certain emerging and continuing trends. Some of that means sticking to the classics and building on what works. “We’re always hungry for new formats, because strong,
self-contained formats have been the lifeblood of the channel for a long time, with shows such as American Pickers, Pawn Stars and Forged in Fire,” Lehrer says. But the need to go big is certainly felt at History. “Broadly, we’re looking for big, branddefining premium doc Lehrer projects that lean into the historical storytelling we’re known for,” he adds. “In February, we have our Washington six-hour doc that’s executive produced by Doris Kearns Goodwin, that really tells an iconic story in American history, and I think tells it in a pretty unique, fresh way.” The George Washington doc will be followed by a Ulysses S. Grant project with Leonardo DiCaprio on board as executive producer. These kinds of loosely-related, medium-length projects are a winning combo at the moment. “What we’ve found is one-off docs, the kind of two-hour doc that exists as an island, have been harder and harder to bring audiences to over the last couple of years,” says Lehrer. “The marketing heft it takes to bring people to a one-off is often better focused on a multipart doc, or an ongoing series. So we’ve tried to reprioritize what we would call limited series or miniseries, or an ongoing strand of specials, that appear with a consistency across a quarter or a year.”
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