by George Adams
Nearly a decade ago, for a myriad of reasons, my personal and artistic life changed overnight. I finished shooting a TV movie, walked off set, and never went back.
That was then. Today my life is on an even keel and, finally, I’m back in the drama saddle.
Which has left me asking one question: What the Hell happened whilst I was away?
The first thing I noticed was how few Australian dramas were actually being made. Compared to ten years ago, our TV fiction landscape feels strangely desolate.
However, when I look at what television drama costs these days, the fall in volume starts to make sense. Bigger budgets inevitably mean fewer shows. That’s just pure economics.
But I don’t think economics is our biggest problem.
It’s never been easy to get shows picked up here, we are a small nation and the opportunities for screen drama have always been relatively limited. However, a decade ago, between the commercial networks, ABC, SBS and Foxtel, along with the production of a solid stable of big screen movies every year, domestic storytelling felt like it was punching above its weight.
Cut to now, and those same Networks are struggling to maintain their control of the market and, more importantly, a meaningful relevance to their audience. The streaming giants have reshaped the creative and financial playing fields of Australia and the world. But it appears that the changes they’ve brought with them, instead of galvanising the pre-existing drama outlets to be bolder, are having quite the opposite effect.
Rather than exploring creative ways to take on the streamers, the local players appear to be shrinking in both their confidence and their creative vision for TV drama.
If we’re not careful, this lack of confidence and originality may well lead us into a longer-term decline.
One of my first bosses was the Controller of BBC Drama. Even the title says something. He wasn’t simply employed to develop projects. He was employed to make decisions. If he believed in a show, he could greenlight production. If the show failed, the responsibility was his and, if it succeeded, so was the credit.
That degree of individual creative and financial decision-making was already getting rarer before the streamers arrived, but now it feels like it no longer exists.
I suspect most projects today have to run the gauntlet of decision making by committee and that’s understandable when every decision potentially involves tens of millions of dollars. But sadly, committees have never been the ally of creativity.
With committees, responsibility is shared; no one person, or even department, owns the final decision, and worse, there’s a real danger that all the elements that made the project distinctive in the first place, are smoothed away.
More often than not, you end up with a camel when you really wanted a horse.
Committees don’t necessarily kill ideas, they simply sandpaper them down. They take off the sharp edges, they soften difficult themes, they tame dangerous characters. Every aspect becomes slightly more optimistic and slightly less dangerous. In the end, it all becomes very safe. You don’t get something terrible, you just get something that nobody really loves.
True originality and diversity are inevitably the first victims of drama by committee, but worse than that, all the shows start to feel the same, regardless of which network they’re showing on.
Ironically, with the massive increase in choices available to them, audiences worldwide have demonstrated, time and again, that they’ll warm to the quirky, the original and the challenging, if it’s executed brilliantly.
Whether it’s Adolescence, Slow Horses, Baby Reindeer, The Pitt or The Detectorists, viewers have proven that they’re open to less conventional storytelling as long as it’s well made.
The one thing that these shows have in common is an original voice. Someone, at some stage, heard that voice and got behind it.
In the same way that, in the past, someone here got behind Brides of Christ, The Slap, Blue Murder, Mr Inbetween, Secret Life of Us, or Mystery Road.
What we really need are for the free-to-air networks and their executives to have the confidence to find and commission the most original and exciting stories in the marketplace and then fight/cajole/persuade “the committee” to ensure that the final show stays true to the original premise.
Backing original creative voices, being distinctive rather than derivative, thinking local and acting global, that’s what Australian drama has always been good at.
It’s those voices that need to be found and heard again and it’s those voices that will give Australia a meaningful seat at the new table of TV drama, not just here at home, but around the World.
The free-to-airs will never outspend the likes of a Netflix or a Disney, but maybe they can out-imagine them.
Australian drama has never won by being the biggest player in the room. We’ve won by being distinctive and if we’re going to thrive in the next decade, then we are going to need fewer committee-built camels and a lot more thoroughbred horses.
About George Adams
In his time in Australia George has been the Executive Producer of two award winning documentaries, a BAFTA winning TV drama series, a 3D IMAX movie and the hugely successful, Wolf Creek. He was Producer of the drama/documentary series Australia On Trial. He created the award-winning drama series Bed of Roses and then created, produced and was show-runner on the multi award winning drama series The Doctor Blake Mysteries and its TV movie sequel The Blake Mysteries. Over the years, George has produced, created and managed well in excess of A$800M of drama production in the UK, Europe and Australia.
