The world premiere of Hulu’s The Testaments is the curtain-raiser to this year’s Series Mania. “The whole team is coming, so that’s very exciting, we will have (creator) Bruce Miller and Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday and Ann Dowd,” Laurence Herszberg, General Director of Series Mania, tells Deadline. Landing the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel and sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale was a coup for the festival, which also has the international premiere of another anticipated U.S. show, The Audacity, the Silicon Valley drama for AMC.
Series Mania has history with AMC after playing Season 2 of Mad Men in its entirety during its first-ever edition in 2010. Matthew Weiner then delivered a Masterclass on the show in 2015 and Christina Hendricks was back in town last year with Small Town, Big Story.
TV has changed massively since Mad Men had its Festival moment. Once a plethora of different cable channels would submit shows, but consolidation means there are fewer sending projects in. And while it can still attract splashy series, Fréderic Lavigne notes the overall volume of drama production down, the number of shows submitted to the Festival this year has declined.
“Instead of 450 applications we are around 380 and it’s the first time we have a concrete sign that the end of the bubble arrived, the end of the peak TV is really there,” he says. “I think it’s quite related to the decrease of the production.”
Herszberg says: “We have five months to receive 380 shows and that fine to make a selection, but it shows something about production. People are more careful about releasing shows, and it takes more time because they want to produce less.”
International Credits: Belgian, British, Polish Standouts
If the overall number is down, Lavigne reports submissions from over 60 countries this time. “We have still a huge number of countries applying and it really means that this industry is worldwide now. And this is where the U.S. platforms sometimes help because they are also producing local shows.”
He points to Proud, Karol Klementewicz’s Polish series for HBO Max. It follows a young gay man whose life is turned upside down when he suddenly finds himself in charge of a baby. “It’s a daring subject for Poland and is really also possible because it’s for a platform,” Lavigne says.
Like The Audacity, Proud plays in the International Competition. Poland also has an entry in the International Panorama sidebar, with period political thriller Variola Vera.
There are three Belgian shows in that category, including Best Immigrant. Series Mania has never shied away from series with social and political themes. This drama follows a couple forced to compete on a ruthless reality show to win a residency permit after a far-right government introduces a brutal immigration regime. “It’s not a ‘dystopia’ because it is what we’re looking at,” says Herszberg. “There are so many connections with what has happened [in the world].” The other Belgian shows are historical prison drama Breendonk for VRT and sci-fi series Ethernal for RTBF.
The UK is also putting in a strong showing, with shows in several categories, including Waiting For The Out and Major Players in the International Competition, and Babies, Prisoner 951 and Small Prophets in Panorama. All of the above are for the BBC, except Major Players, which is for Channel 4 and made in co-production with Germany’s ZDF, possibly highlighting a trend.
Series Mania is only an hour-and-a-half from London and the Series Mania bosses see an increased appetite from the Brits to co-produce with their fellow Europeans, as money becomes harder to find on the other side of the Atlantic.
Herszberg says: “Of course, the British people are very creative and what is very interesting is that with less being co-produced with the U.S., they are now, again, more interested in producing with Western Europe and the rest of Europe.”
There are two British TV drama luminaries giving masterclasses: “It’s a great year because we also have two guests for Masterclasses coming to talk about their careers, Russell T. Davis, and Steven Moffat,” Lavigne says.
Festival Closer: Lighter Moments
The Festival typically closes with some lighter fare. Last year it was the new season of High Intellectual Potential, which has been remade successfully for ABC in the U.S. Quebec has a strong local drama scene and provides this year’s closer, Vitrerie Joyal (The Glass House in English). The family comedy-drama follows André Joyal, the owner of a glass shop, who tries to save his declining business while facing family upheaval in a rapidly changing world. Another Quebec-originated comedy drama plays in Panorama in the shape of Welcome to Kingston-Falls.
As they prepare to welcome people to Lille, Series Mania has become, simultaneously, a public-facing festival and a huge industry event and market. Talking to the people that have built it is always illuminating in that the conversation always comes back to the shows.
“Fréderic and I are coming from the cinema industry, and we were always so interested in the stories being told and the atmosphere and the screenwriters and the directors, and so we built everything from this,” says Herszberg.
“It’s a festival state of mind,” Lavigne adds.