“I don’t think any of us realised the scope that Netflix brings - being on the platform and being available around the world immediately for anyone to watch on their phone or their TV,” he told the RTS.
“It’s insane. I’d worked in film where there’s a build up to the release date, but to have it all there at the touch of your fingers was quite surreal.
As television’s great disruptor, if Netflix is to take on a Regency period drama, expect it to try and reinvent the form. Enter Bridgerton, the streaming service’s Christmas big-hitter and a fresh take on the decades-old style.
For all the show’s traditional draws, such as the opulence of the debutante season, high-society scandal and growls of “I demand satisfaction”, a modern-day sensibility has been smartly woven throughout.
At first glance, the outlook looks less than sunny for traditional broadcasters faced with competition from Netflix and the other streamers. Dig a little deeper and the situation looks a lot more nuanced.
That was the main takeaway from the second of two Steve Hewlett Scholarship debates, “British broadcasting in crisis?”, organised jointly by the RTS and Media Society.
Victory is not always achieved by the first out of the blocks or the fastest car into the opening corner. Sometimes, steadiness of purpose and coming from behind is more effective. That sums up the strategy that Discovery has adopted in the uber-competitive streaming wars.
Having watched Netflix, Amazon Prime and, more recently, Disney+ and others enter the global streaming market, Discovery+ will launch its own service in the US only in January. Some observers have argued that it might be too little, too late.
“I saw Netflix, I saw Gillian Anderson and Asa Butterfield and I just thought, there’s no way I’m going to get it,” laughed Gatwa.
He was used to going for auditions that wanted big names, so joining Sex Education - where for most of the cast it was their big break - he thought it was great how new talent was being championed.
“It’s Emma Mackie’s first job,” said Gatwa, “one of the big plus sides of [streamers] like Netflix is there’s so much work being created now, there’s a whole bunch of actors who now have opportunities that weren’t around before.”
The mockumentary will have an all-star cast playing fictitious ‘renowned’ historians, looking back at the landmark year of 2020 with real-life archival footage from the past twelve months.
Hugh Grant (The Undoing) will be playing one such historian and will be joined by Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction), Lisa Kudrow (Friends), comedian Leslie Jones (Saturday Night Live) and Kumail Nanjiani (The Lovebirds).
Over the past year, SVoD services such as Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock (NBCUniversal) and AppleTV+ have come on stream, joining the likes of Netflix and Amazon.
Alan Wolk, co-founder of media consultancy TV[R]EV, speaking from New Jersey, dubbed the streaming boom a “flixcopalypse”. He said two more – Paramount+ and Discovery+ – were due to launch soon.
Success is not guaranteed. The short-form streamer Quibi, launched by former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, collapsed this month after only half a year in business.
From the team behind The Stranger and Safe, the series will follow three key characters whose sinister past resurfaces to threaten their everyday lives. Harlan Coben and Danny Brocklehurst (Brassic) will be collaborating alongside Richard Fee and Nicola Shindler to write and create the series.
The series will see Stay Close relocate to an English setting from the States.
The genealogy documentary series returns, with Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who) tracing her Yorkshire family tree in this opening episode.
Candour is a big deal for Netflix co-founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings. Having argued for “increased candour” early on in this eye-popping account of Netlix’s corporate culture, he returns to the idea some 60 pages later in a section called “Pump up candour”. Not content with that, he makes the point again, towards the end of the book, with the exhortation: “Max up candour” (Chapter 8).
