Seven weeks after joining a company, most senior executives would be expected to have sat down with everyone they’ll be working with. Banijay — the TV behemoth behind shows such as Peaky Blinders, Survivor, Black Mirror, SAS Rogue Heroes, Marie Antoinette, Masterchef, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Big Brother and many, many more — isn’t your average company, as its new global head of scripted Christian Wikander has quickly discovered.
Thanks to an acquisitions drive that didn’t stop after its $2.2 billion purchase of Endemol Shine closed mid-2020 — Banijay now has a roster of more than 60 labels working in scripted on its books, and from all corners of the globe. Seven weeks into the job, it’s impressive that Wikander has even managed to have face-to-face time with more than half.
The Swede, who left his role as HBO Max Nordic’s commissioning editor and vice president of original programming in 2022 as part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s major restructuring, replaces Lars Blomgren, the veteran exec having returned to his producing roots earlier this year by joining The Morning Show producer Michael Ellenberg’s Media Res. He went from having his department essentially shut down to a new company where, he says, scripted is viewed as a positive part of its future.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter from Stockholm in his first major interview since starting at Banijay, Wikander explains why he thinks the streamers pulling back from originals actually offers him more opportunities, the importance of engaging with AI, and why scripted companies have to be faster to react to audience demand, including “parking” projects that don’t get traction.
What are your impressions of Banijay so far?
I’m really enjoying this — I was coming out of HBO Nordics, where it was mostly about closing down and taking care of desk cleaning. So I’ve really enjoyed being here so far, looking to the future and being in an environment with people who are looking forward and building stuff. So I’m very, very positive about it.
Banijay is such a huge company, with more than 60 scripted labels. How do you even try to keep on top of it all? Have your first seven weeks basically been a series of endless Zoom meetings?
From a personal perspective, I think it’s important that you embrace the fact that you cannot really be on top of it all. And to be honest, it’s not really about being on top of it all, because the queens and kings of the company are the producers. So my role, and the scripted team role, is about supporting them. So I started to just travel around and sit down with each and every one of the labels. I’m more than halfway through now. I started far off — in L.A., New Zealand, Sydney and Mumbai. Really, it’s been about listening, trying to understand where they come from, what are their strengths and what are the challenges. And with that kind of overview in the beginning, it’s potentially easier to see where we should be more focussed or in what we can give the best support.
Where do you think you should be more focussed?
The short answer is that it’s about continuing to do what we had been doing, and what Lars had been doing so successfully. It is about connecting the different labels and getting them to share their experiences. We’re in a market that is in this kind of correction, where buyers are moving away from the default setup of acquiring global rights on every occasion, and that presents a big opportunity for us. Because it means we’re back to the windowing system, we’re back to co-financing. And co-financing is something that, in a group like this, is a strength. If we can really help and support each other to access money, access markets, and to service production, there’s a lot of stuff that we can really help facilitate.
It’s interesting that you’re talking about the current situation — where streamers are pulling back and spending budgets cut — as a positive for you. So there are definite ways where you can see this as being a gain for Banijay?
Absolutely. My department was closed in Stockholm and after the merger, the streamer [HBO Max] decided not to do original scripted content in the Nordics anymore. I think part of that really makes sense. Because we come from an era where global buyers have invested a lot of money in scripted content to build a local presence, kind of like a marketing scheme. But seldom did they talk about the actual performance of each title. So when Netflix, 18 months ago, was for the first time hit, you could see something was changing, I think that really led to the fact that each title today, in any territory, needs to be there on his own merits and will be measured on his own performance. I think that’s a big shift.
What are the big titles coming up from Banijay that people are talking about?
One that I hope people will be talking about is Three Little Birds, which is with Douglas Road and Tiger Aspect and was written by Lenny Henry. I think that’s a wonderful story and is really one of those that has something to say about our time. Hopefully, it will be something that can come back as a returning series. It has big potential. Another one is Ronja the Robbers Daughter, another character from the estate of Astrid Lindgren who did Pippi Longstocking. It’s in production in Sweden with Filmlance, and it’s going to be on Viaplay. It’s for the family, but if you’re six or seven years old, you’re probably going to need a pillow, because it’s going to be quite scary. And we recently announced the French series on Apple TV+, Carême, which is about a cook hired to spy in the French royal court. I think it’s a fantastic story, based on true characters. And wonderful for us to have something with Apple.
Have you experienced any impact from the writers’ strike? Has there been a shift towards international and non-WGA productions as it rumbles on?
To be honest, I haven’t. But I think, in general terms and not simply for Banijay, I think there is right now a slight shift towards more unscripted to keep the supply going. We’re following [the strike] closely and hope it’s going to be solved soon. But rumours suggest the contrary, so it might be going for a while. So of course that’s going to have an impact.
The subject of AI has obviously been closely linked to the writers strike conversations. What are your thoughts on it?
First of all, great stories are in our DNA and we’re looking to work with creatives. So for us, that’s going to continue to be the focus as the powerhouse we are. But I think AI is here to stay and, as with anything that you kind of feel uncertain about, I think it’s very much about getting educated, getting into it, and learning. I think that’s very important for us. It’s a tool in the toolbox.
Do you use it at all? I keep getting told I should use ChatGPT, but just fear the more I feed it, the more I’m speeding up my own unemployment.
I think you should. Because otherwise everyone else is going to tell you what’s good or bad about it, and I think it’s about creating your own experience. Also, the speed of development… it took Chat GPT two months to reach a million users. TikTok took nine months. So the magnitude and the speed tell me that we very much need to be involved. And you can only be involved if you understand it. I just learned that one thing that is coming out of AI is that it has a very white male perspective. It’s not diverse. I think that’s one very important example of why we need to get in there. We need to be engaged. We need to understand it. And you need to be aware of how you use it.
What are your own personal tastes when it comes to TV?
That’s a good question. What I’m looking at now… I’m rewatching Succession. Because I want to understand how it works. Rewatching it, I feels more like a melodrama, more like a soap. The way it is built and created of course is very unique. But I think there is so much room in the market for melodrama, I really do. It doesn’t have to be at the level of Succession, but in some territories right now, buyers are looking for more long-running volume productions again. And part of the genre they operate in is melodrama. So that’s why I’m looking into Succession. And it really works on a second viewing. The other I’m watching right now is Happy Valley season 3, which just reached Sweden.
You’ve only been in the role a couple of months, but when are we going to see the first shows from Banijay that you’ve been involved in or helped steer?
The scripted business takes a long time. It’s an oil tanker and goes slowly in one direction. It’ll probably take a year, a year and a half. But what I will say about the slate, another thing that is part of the changes now is that a slate today for a scripted company needs to be slightly more agile. I think commissioners and streamers are slightly quicker in deciding what they’re looking for and better at expressing that. Genre, for example, is something that should be on most slates, because I think that’s something that’s in demand.
That’s definitely been the case for the last couple of years on the film side. So the appetite for genre has moved to TV too?
Absolutely. And I think, as a producer, you should park projects quicker that don’t get traction now and refocus yourself. I don’t mean scrap those projects, because they will find a home eventually, but you can’t really build a strategy unless you can be quicker in focusing your slate.
Your predecessor was also Swedish. What is it about Swedish and senior scripted TV execs?
I don’t know! Maybe it’s a coincidence? But what I would say is that I was one of the commissioners on The Bridge. I think what happened in the Nordics, starting with Borgen in Denmark, was that we started getting access to money from outside the territory and that drove up the production quality. That, together with an enormous tradition of writing and telling stories, but with small resources, led to a boost with our content becoming more internationally attractive and internationally regarded. Because of that, a lot of us who were active in the business developed a fairly good network internationally, and that took us into many different panels, situations and meetings. I think that’s part of why people from the Nordics have been so present in the international market.
Source: Hollywood
