When it comes to what makes premium television, service Stan is a big believer in the c-word, or c-words, according to head of originals Amanda Duthie.
Duthie was among the day three panellists at this week’s Future Vision summit in Melbourne, appearing alongside Made Up Stories producer Bruna Papandrea, Anonymous Content television president David Levine, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin, and 3 Body Problem director Minkie Spiro titled ‘What’s in the DNA of Premium Television?’.
When asked by moderator Penny Smallacombe about Stan’s definition of premium television, Duthie said discussions at the conference had got her “thinking a lot about the c-word”, albeit those that didn’t carry the stigma of ‘content’.
“It is about collaboration, creativity, and connection; it is about cut-through, about community and whether that’s our audience community,” she told the panel.
“As a single territory streamer, we’re trying to enable work that will speak to an Australian audience but because of how things get financed, we need to also find that community globally.
“And how we consume that work, whether it is a singular piece of work, a weekly drop, or a box set; how do we help guide our audiences to find distinctive and diverse worlds and stories from the worlds and stories we commission?”
“But the two c-words that have been emerging most is about craft, not just from the writers, producers, and directors but all the creatives in front of and behind the camera – that’s what makes premium – and it’s about consequential, finding that compassion and connection on deeper levels to be able to enable this premium work.”
After Levine noted that one of the determining factors for commissioning at HBO, where he spent more than a decade as EVP and co-head of drama, was that a project had “to be worthy of something”, Duthie noted that consequential was “not about worthy”.
“Consequential is about you thinking about the show afterward and you laugh out loud if it was funny and you want to talk about it with your friends, but also it resonates beyond the immediate consumption and pleasure of that,” she said.
After announcing a slate of 25 originals for 2024 in March, the streamer has made a string of production announcements across the past couple of months, ranging from new seasons of Bump and Black Snow to new series Sunny Nights, featuring US stars Will Forte and D’Arcy Carden, and Christmas film Nugget Is Dead: A Christmas Story. Original titles to have premiered on the streamer this year have included drama Exposure and crime comedy Population 11, filmed in the small town of Derby in Western Australia’s Kimberley region.
Duthie went on to single out Population 11 and Black Snow as examples of what “excited” the company from a commissioning perspective.
“Stan is delighted and proud to be able to commission work from all over Australia, and what excites us every time is that little corner of Australia we’ve never seen before, whether that is Proserpine and Airlie Beach, and [Black Snow producer] Kaylene Butler enabling us to tell so many of the stories up around North Queensland and bring them to screens not just in Australia but the world,” she said.
“Telling [Black Snow] through a very clever story by Lucas [Taylor] but also in deep collaboration with the community and having such a delicious star as Travis to be able to lead us into that story to attract a broad audience, while working alongside Talijah [Blackman-Corowa] and Jemmason [Power] – brand new talents on screen – that’s what excites us. That’s part of the extra risk we should be taking every day in our commissioning.”