How France Television’s Slash Is Attracting a Gen Z Audience

variety.com:

Ben Croll Up until a few short years ago, French scripted dramas offered terrestrial viewers and international buyers the same steady promise: Be they criminal investigators or 17th-century dukes, rarely would a series’ cast skew too young.“Traditional French broadcasters served a somewhat old­er set of viewers,” says Series Mania artistic director Frederic Lavigne. “And they oriented their programming toward that public.

The characters were more or less the age of the audience.”But for the occasional historical re-creation, most scripted offerings — stemming from both pay TV and free-to-air broadcasters — tended to fall into more procedural models.

Indeed, if viewed from afar, France might have seemed home to more middle-age inspectors than any other demographic. “Under the traditional model, [public] broadcasters couldn’t take as many risks because they were targeting so many million viewers per night,” Lavigne says.

Public broadcasters including France Television “are still very limited. They cannot broadcast anything too audacious or outré [during primetime] and can only air more challenging subjects on a limited number of nights.”That tide began to turn when France Television launched online platform Slash in 2018.