Transnational Circulation of European TV Series. National Models and Industrial Strategies for Scripted Pay Imports/Exports

Pay fiction experienced a production boom in Europe between 2008 and 2017. The output of original productions in Europe’s five main markets (France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the UK) leapt from 8 series in 2008 to 47 in 2017 – a rise of +490% (as shown in the previous chapter). This growth is based on a change in the national production paradigms, which are increasingly modelled on “quality TV” from the US (Thompson 1997). Unsurprisingly, most of the titles travel very well across borders, both within and outside Europe. These series are much more export-friendly than what the national public and private (free) TV producers traditionally used to produce (Scaglioni and Barra 2013). This renaissance of sorts in European scripted pay TV production is also bound up with major changes in the industry that affect how European fic- tion productions begin to circulate. Besides pay TV growth in all the main markets studied, it is also about the arrival of the global SVOD giants based in the US (Netflix and Amazon Prime Video), the explosion of European OTT platforms, and the ever-greater take-up of streaming technology by the more traditional networks (Lobato 2019). All these factors have led to both a certain uniformity in productions across Europe and an increased transnational circulation of these products. This chapter maps out the de- velopment of the transnational circulation of European series in the five sample countries from two distinct yet complementary standpoints. First, we explore the circulation of pay fiction in Europe from an export perspec- tive; second, we focus on how those countries have gone about importing European scripted pay fiction in this context.