David George, CEO of ITV America, had a “lightning bolt” moment when his company was making the latest season of Peacock’s reality hit Love Island.
The television business was changing; production was no longer a “gigantic money-making commodity” and artificial intelligence and the rise of the creator economy were shaking up the sector.
On the eve of his company’s tenth anniversary, George needed to do something big. The Rage Against The Machine fan needed to take the power back and reorganize his company’s focus and he was going to use Love Island as his acid test.
The show started slowly; it ran for three seasons on CBS before moving to Peacock and it wasn’t until Season 6 that it really became a major hit. But when it did, there were spinoffs such as Love Island Games and Beyond The Villa and a healthy water bottle business. FanDuel wanted to get involved, legions of fans were swarming bars to find out who was leaving the villa. There’s even the possibility of a feature film.
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“Love Island acts a lot more like a sport than it does a television show,” George told Deadline. “This brand has a tremendous amount of value. We should be thinking about everything through the lens of how do we create something that creates peripheral value for us as a company. The economics of production are getting tighter and tighter. So, if you’re not trying to figure out how to make peripheral money, it’s going to be really difficult for you to continue in content.”
This led George to focus on IP, developing fewer but bigger shows and centralizing its production labels. He was helped by the return of David Eilenberg, who rejoined the company after a sojourn at Roku.
The pair decided to “streamline” its business. ITV America had been split into various labels including ITV Entertainment, which produces Love Island, Leftfield Pictures, which makes History’s Alone, Fixer Upper producer High Noon Entertainment, female-skewing Sirens Media and true-crime focused Good Caper Content.
The idea instead was to essentially run everything through one Eilenberg-led group with one central development and production slate. That’s not to say that legacy shows won’t still feature a Leftfield logo in the credits or High Noon won’t take on a new property show, but the days of slicing everything into niche banners is done.
“A few years ago, we went through the genre strategy and said we wanted to be best in class at all these different types of programming so we aligned the production companies into crime and lifestyle and game. But now you look at the industry and there’s just not the volume of commissioning that there was. It’s harder and harder for us to get something through, and the answer is to streamline things. You don’t really need eight or nine full production development slates moving forward, you just really need a slate that’s great at everything and very concise,” he added.
The streamers, such as Netflix, Amazon, Peacock and Paramount+, are all clearly searching for scale and it’s no different for a supplier like ITV.
As such, George is going all in on its intellectual property from Hell’s Kitchen to Alone and beyond, while refocusing on developing and producing bigger shows than it previously did.
Hell’s Kitchen, which just premiered its 24th season on Fox, has produced nearly 400 episodes, Alone just finished its twelfth season and has produced close to 150 episodes, Love Island is closing in on 250 episodes across seven seasons and its true-crime series The First 48 Hours, which airs on A&E, is nearly at 500 episodes.
“The way I see the world now is less through labels and more through IP. We need to be more like an IP company, as opposed to being a production company. Because how you create and monetize IP moving forward is the single most important thing. You have to have hit shows and over the last ten years, we’ve created a really good collection of IP. But we’ve always looked at them as TV shows. We never really looked at them as anything other than that. The world is just changing,” George said.
To create this, ITV America needs big shows and rights. Cable television is no longer cutting it, particularly as many of these companies are still requiring more rights than they used to, so that focus is on the streamers and broadcast television.
“We’re focused on bigger shows now and that can range from conceptually or the talent,” he said. “The streamers are starting to understand that they’re going to have to start being more flexible on rights, [particularly] where there’s more than bidder.”
ITV America was able to achieve this with a recent big-budget project that landed at CBS from its newly minted Nashville division, led by Adam Reed, who ran Marriage Boot Camp producer Thinkfactory Media, which is focused on music and comedy.
“There was a lot of competition around it. You look at the rights position we actually were able to get from CBS and we’ve unlocked some global value from it already because of the names attached. Not only does that fill our P&L faster, [we’re] getting a better rights position to create global value and also unlock ancillary. It’s about creating the IP and those peripheral bits of value,” he added.
This Nashville project was developed internally, rather than being based on a UK format, which was a key focus for George and his team over the last 12 months.
BRITISH FORMATS
Having said that, ITV America is blessed with a pipeline of ideas from Britain and abroad; Love Island is a British format (one that also broke out on ITV2 in its third season). As such, it has a number of upcoming titles as well as library classics to plunder for the U.S. broadcast networks and streamers.
These include Nobody’s Fool, The Neighbourhood, Celebrity Sabotage and The Heat.
Nobody’s Fool is actually from a U.S. production company, Nobody’s Hero, run by Brits Christopher Potts and Jonty Nash, which has a deal with ITV America. The series, which will air on ITV in the new year, is hosted by national treasure Danny Dyer and The Inbetweeners star Emily Atack. It sees ten contestants selected to stay in a ‘Smart House’. They will take part in daily individual quizzes that will test different areas of intelligence in order to build a group prize pot. But the twist is that only the contestants themselves will know how well they have done, and what information they choose to share with their competitors is down to them.
It’s understood that Fox was interested but ITV America decided to sell it in Britain to gain a better rights position.
The Neighbourhood is a “street-sized” reality game hosted by Graham Norton, also for ITV. It sees real-life households from all walks of life move in side by side, finding themselves not only neighbors but also fierce competitors. It comes from Lifted Entertainment and The Garden.
“We’ve been having some conversations with some U.S. buyers. It’s set in a UK neighborhood, which is clearly different from a U.S. neighborhood, but we’re asking how do we create shows that we can make in multiple territories for efficiency,” said George.
There’s also reality game show Celebrity Sabotage and The Heat, a cooking/dating format hosted by Love Island breakout star and podcaster Olivia Atwood.
George said that it will likely wait to see the reaction to the show, which launches next year, before bringing out to the U.S. “Is this one of those shows that the market’s going to wait to see how it performs, or is this one of those shows that is so good that we think we can just bring it out right now?,” he asked
He said that many buyers are “risk averse” and the fact that it is launching in the UK, a key market for streamers, can make it a harder sell to the likes of Netflix. “If it does really well in the UK, how are you pitching that into some of these streamers? The UK is off the board. The show has to be that much better for them not to care that there’s already an English-speaking version sitting in the UK.”
In terms of existing titles, George has not given up hope for another U.S. version of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here. ITV America pitched a version of the show, Celebrity Castle, in 2021, with Blumhouse Television, and took the show out again 18 months later, but hasn’t snagged a buyer.
George jokes that I’m A Celeb is the “hanging chad” of reality shows. “I will not stop until that show is sold and I think we’re closer than we’ve ever been,” he added.
Hell’s Kitchen, which started as a UK show, is currently in Season 24, part of a two-season renewal where it moved to Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut. That move may prompt a revival of the show in the UK, where it aired for four seasons between 2004 and 2009. George revealed that he’s had conversations about doing a UK version in Connecticut. “It would be kind of an inverted hub, because you would never think that you would want to bring a UK show into the U.S. for cost purpose. But anyways, there is some activity around Hell’s Kitchen right now,” he added.
SCRIPTED TELLY
George is also now in charge of scripted television in the U.S. Philippe Maigret, who ran ITV Studios America, which produced Apple’s Michael Douglas-fronted Franklin, is leaving at the end of the year. While he’ll continue to work on series such as Felicity Jones-led Formula 1 drama One, which comes from joint venture Bedrock Entertainment, and is in the works at Prime Video, George will now oversee that business as well as oversee its joint venture Tomorrow Studios, which is behind series such as Netflix’s One Piece and Amazon’s The Better Sister.
Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements-led Tomorrow Studios will continue to operate independently and will focus on premium series, but George is plotting the company’s revamped scripted strategy and is looking for new avenues.
“I’m having conversations with network heads about multi-cam sitcoms. Do we want to go down that path of multi-cam sitcoms again for broadcast? Because broadcast, ultimately, if they’re going to stay in the scripted game, they need a more economical version of scripted to operate,” he said. “How are we attacking the other quadrants of the business? There’s a reason why so many of these UK dramas are working in America now, and it’s because the price is right. I can make a meal out of these. We have to be in that business in some way, shape or form.”
ITV America was ostensibly created when it acquired Brent Montgomery’s Pawn Stars producer Leftfield Pictures in 2015. George took over as CEO in 2018 as Montgomery left to form Wheelhouse.
George is now optimistic about the next few years. “Too often people in this business look backwards with fondness. I think there needs to be a level of excitement in the industry about what’s to come,” he said. “What excites me most about all of that is the proposition that creators can create actual value moving forward, as opposed to relying on these content portals that you have to do a deal with about your around your idea.
“In the future, why wouldn’t we just make Love Island on our own? Why would we need to sell it to a Peacock or a Netflix? If we’re good enough, we’ll create a Love Island and we’ll find the money to do it on our own,” he concluded.