Gareth Neame
A Conversation with
Gareth Neame
Gareth Neame, Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning Producer and Executive, is the powerhouse behind the hit television success, Downton Abbey.
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s the Managing Director of Carnival Films, he has brought Downton Abbey to global success, winning a Golden Globe for Best Mini Series and nine Primetime Emmy Awards, including Best Mini Series. We spoke to Gareth about his early days of Downton Abbey with the show’s creator Julian Fellowes, seeing the series incredible success (it is the most nominated non-US show in the history of the Emmys!), an inside look to the next season, and his future plans. Downton Abbey has had huge success, both in the UK and the US. Obviously it is an extraordinarily well made production, but has the degree of its success surprised you and what do you think explains it? I hoped that if we made a good show that it would be popular in the UK and with the core anglophile (and therefore capped) audiences around the world. What we could not have anticipated was just what an enormous hit the show would be when first broadcast in Britain. That phenomenon grew as the show was rolled out across the many other territories in the world. The 22 | Britweek LOS ANGELES
first season in the US demonstrated very strong viewing figures for PBS, but I think we really started to see the beginning of the real success in the US following our wins at the Emmys and Golden Globes. I believe it is the combination of a much loved and ex-
pressly British genre – the English country house – and a very contemporary storytelling and production style; together with an ensemble of 20+ characters and themes of drama, laugh out loud comedy and good, old-fashioned romance that have led to the