Streaming Boom Sparks Evolution in German Drama

variety.com:

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorGermany has been a source of shows for the international market for decades, but with series like “Deutschland 83” in 2015, and “Babylon Berlin” and “Dark” in 2017, the bar was raised and the sense of what constituted German drama shifted, and international buyers took note.One of them was Christian Vesper, who bought “Deutschland 83” when he was drama chief at Sundance TV.

Vesper remembers that at that time it was unheard of for a U.S. channel to buy a German drama. “That was an outlier. It was a really, really, really, really hard thing to get approval on, because it was a German show.

Who buys a German show for American television?”One of the issues was that German broadcasters and the producers who supplied them primarily focused on the local audience. “The difficulty was that they have such a big domestic market that they haven’t felt that pressure to do anything but for the domestic market, which is also quite an older market,” says Vesper, who is now president of global drama at Fremantle, the owner of “Deutschland 83” production house UFA, as well as drama producers in many other territories. “At a somewhat different pace than the rest of Europe, there is an energy to the shows that are being developed there,” he adds. “One of the things we are really focused on is supporting talent and being more talent-driven.

Typically, Germany had been a producer-oriented business, whereas in the U.S. it was always a writer-driven business, and I think that Germany is finding more of a balance now in that and that’s been exciting.