Producing Children’s Television in the On Demand Age

By Anna Potter

This book provides a detailed account of the creative, economic and regulatory processes underlying the production of children’s television in a multi-platform era. Its collection of integrated case studies includes extended interviews with leading producers whose programs are watched by children all over the world. These reveal the impact of digitization on the funding, distribution and consumption of children’s television, and the ways that producers have adapted their creative practice accordingly. In its comprehensive analysis of the production culture of children’s television, this book provides a valuable lens through which to view broader transformations in media industries in the on-demand age.

This original and engaging book explores the creative processes underlying the production of children’s television, with close attention to underlying economic and policy dynamics. It does so through a combination of detailed case studies and interviews with leading producers from across three English-language markets. In its examination of the impact of new streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime on the funding, production and distribution of children’s screen content, the book will reveal how producers successfully created content for these increasingly influential new services.

It offers important insights into the production of children’s screen content in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and builds on previous research in the field. The addition of analysis, which provides the context of historical, regulatory and economic factors that shape production in all three countries, is important for situating the personal testimonies and providing some critical distance. The variety of productions chosen for analysis, including drama, factual productions and animation, represents the very different pressures on different genres. Previous studies have looked at children’s content as one genre, whereas this new study reveals children’s content to be as diverse in range as adult content.

The case studies show the pressures and opportunities emerging from different national and international context and offers its own unique take on matters such as diversity, gender representation and indeed the ethics of representing children from a producers’ perspective. As a contribution to industry studies, this volume represents a valuable addition to the literature and will no doubt be referenced by future studies.

The quantity and quality of original interview material goes far beyond interviews in the trade press. Combined with the rich detail of production case studies, the articulate interviews and Potter’s highly engaging mode of writing, this book is an invaluable additional to research in the area.

This book will provide a crucial analysis of success stories in the children’s screen production industries at a time of flux and adaptation as television’s distribution revolution takes place.

The book will be indispensable for scholars of children’s television and of UK, New Zealand and Australian media policy. It will also engage a wider audience interested in television production, production studies and digital distribution – including those teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It will be a valuable library resource for courses that include screen media industries and television production culture as part of their content. It will be of interest to scholars beyond children’s television because of its analysis of success stories in screen production at a time of change and uncertainty.

It will also be of relevance to the international screen production sector and industry bodies, including screen organizations such as Screen Australia, and the UK’s Children’s Media Foundation, for its analysis of success stories in the screen production industries. Also, of interest to the many groups with vested interests around children and children’s media –

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789382938

Book preview

Producing Children’s Television in the On Demand Age

Producing Children’s Television in the On Demand Age

Anna Potter

First published in the UK in 2020 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

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For Stuart

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Producing Children’s Television in the On Demand Age

2. Representing Diversity on Public Service Media: Matchbox Pictures, NBCU and ‘The Show for Girls with Balls’

3. Netflix, Nickelodeon and the National: Jonathan M. Shiff Productions’ Mako Mermaids and The Bureau of Magical Things

4. The Making of a Netflix Original: Cheeky Little Media and the Australian Animated Series Bottersnikes and Gumbles

5. Creating Streamable, Diverse Content for Children’s BBC: Drummer TV and the My Life Strand

6. From Wellywood to Amazon Prime: Rebooting Thunderbirds Are Go for the Post-Network Era

7. Streaming the Local with Contestable Funding: How New Platform HEIHEI Disrupted Children’s Media Provision in New Zealand

8. Emerging Trends in the Distribution, Production and Consumption of Children’s Television in the On Demand Age

References

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the contributions and support of several organisations and many people. I am enormously grateful to the Australian Research Council for providing me with a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellowship that allowed me to undertake this research project for three gloriously uninterrupted years, from 2016–18. My thanks are also due to The University of the Sunshine Coast’s Deputy-Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation) Roland De Marco, who helped to facilitate its completion, and to both Roland, and Phil Graham for all the mentoring. For the use of the production stills that are included in this book I would like to acknowledge: Cheeky Little Media, Drummer TV, ITV Studios, Jonathan M Shiff Productions, Matchbox Pictures, and New Zealand On Air.

I owe a great deal to the numerous children’s media practitioners who generously share their time, insights and creative practice with me. While so many contributed to this book, I am particularly indebted to Jenny Buckland, Michael Carrington, Kim Dalton, Rachel Davis, Amanda Higgs, Estelle Hughes, Kez Margrie, Amie Mills, Chris Oliver Taylor, Giles Ridge, Jonathan Shiff, Clive Spinks, Tamsin Summers, David Webster and Jane Wrightson. I want to make special mention to the late Stuart McAra. Always enthusiastic, kind and funny, as well as hugely talented, Stuart is greatly missed by those of us privileged to have been his friends. My colleague Ben Goldsmith and research assistant Danielle Kirby both deserve special thanks for their ongoing encouragement and practical assistance during the writing of this book, as does Intellect’s Jessica Lovett for all her help during its production phase. To my partner Wally and children Josh, Tom and Georgia thank you for all your support for my work, and tolerance of my frequent absences, both are much appreciated.

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Producing Children’s Television in the On Demand Age

This book focuses on the producers, production companies and television providers behind key examples of successful contemporary children’s television at a time of challenge and change to established industrial, policy, technological and economic settings. Its series of integrated case studies draws on producers’ first-hand accounts of their professional and creative practices in the post-broadcast era, combining historical, policy, economic and industrial analysis with extensive interview material. In doing so this book evaluates and explains what the developing alliances, ways of funding and distributing content, dispersed production practices and proliferation in on demand streaming services mean for television, for policy-makers, for creative practitioners and for audiences. Each integrated case study describes and analyses producers’ relationship with broadcasters, platforms, policy-makers and the child audience in Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Each underscores the centrality of the producer to contemporary television making, while revealing how producers’ creative autonomy and professional norms have been affected by the transformations engendered by Internet distribution.

In the foregrounding of media practitioners’ voices and in the framing of this study through the lens of children’s television, this study provides new and insightful ways of understanding how television and indeed media industries more broadly are evolving in the on demand age. The collection of case studies concludes with a chapter that focuses on a new service, rather than a specific programme. HEIHEI, a streaming video on demand service for 5- to 8-year-old New Zealand children is profiled alongside chapters on live action and animated, and fictional and factual children’s television programmes because it brings together the key themes of the book – how television is financed, created, distributed and experienced in the on demand era – and points to one potential future for publicly supported content for children. Combined, these integrated case studies and extended interviews with leading practitioners also challenge long held assumptions that creating children’s television is somehow the same as creating television made for adults. It is not. Children’s television is a unique form of cultural production that operates within a particular set of social, institutional, regulatory and economic circumstances. This study allows producers to explain their creative practice in their own words, offering a rare foregrounding of the most influential individuals behind the production of contemporary children’s television for linear and streaming services.

This book places its emphases on producers’ professional practices and outputs during a particular period of upheaval in television production from 2013 to 2019, as digitization and Internet distribution transformed and disrupted media industries worldwide. The producer is understood here as the steward of their programmes’ creative vision, who must also take responsibility for raising finance, and assuming all legal risks during production. The producer must also project manage the production process from start to finish, including hiring key creative practitioners, and ensuring programmes are delivered on time and on budget. The majority of producers interviewed as part of this book’s integrated case studies work in the independent production sector, rather than as salaried, permanent in-house employees. Generally then they operate with very little cushioning; their careers and livelihoods depend on securing a regular supply of programme commissions from the commissioning editors employed by broadcasters and other providers. Several own their production companies and regularly mortgage their homes to cash flow their programme budgets. All are familiar with the complex negotiations required when competing for resources in the crowded field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993). While this field’s make-up varies, from country to country, and from genre to genre, it is commonly characterized by an oversupply of producers, all of whom are competing and occasionally collaborating with one another to create television for children.

Television’s commissioning editors remain the key gatekeepers of contemporary children’s television. They are highly influential figures, operating in a television production ecology where the number of production companies and creatives vastly outnumbers the available resources. Commissioning editors work closely with producers and will often wield significant editorial influence, including final script approval, and ensuring programmes comply with national regulations. It is common for a commissioning editor to be given an executive producer (EP) credit, in recognition of the extent of their involvement in the production process. The role of the EP varies considerably between companies and institutions however. Generally, their role is less creative, and entails securing programme funding, negotiating presales/commissions and licensing deals and any co-production agreements, as well as available tax incentives and contributions from state funding bodies. On some productions however the EP will have significant creative input. These nuances and variations are important, but equally they are difficult to map and quantify because they vary from production to production. The integrated case studies that follow go some way to situating and explaining variations in practices and norms.

Notwithstanding the influence of commissioning editors, the interviews with these producers of children’s television show that they largely remain the source, and guardian, of their programmes’ creative vision. In addition to this creative stewardship, producers often assume EP roles and are thus responsible for sourcing the national and international funding required to make their programmes. Producing children’s television takes then a particular dedication to one’s craft, one usually accompanied by a strong belief in the value of age-specific, high-quality television to children. These apparently selfless convictions frequently coexist in producers with an entrepreneurial commitment to monetizing the programme brands they have created, often with the support of state funding bodies and taxation subsidies. Creative and economic considerations are thus interwoven throughout the production process, in pursuit of a sustainable business model for programmes that will resonate with their intended audience.

The children’s screen production sector encompasses producers, broadcasters, distributors and regulators as well as other stakeholders and special interest groups. These include advocacy groups, such as the UK’s Children’s Media Foundation (CMF), The Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF) and the New Zealand Children’s Screen Trust, and funding bodies, for example Screen Australia, New Zealand On Air and broader screen industry lobby groups such as the UK’s Producers’ Alliance for Cinema and Television, and Australia’s Screen Producers Association. Fierce competition and differing agendas characterize the children’s sector, including between those producing different genres, such as live action drama and animation, and public service and commercial providers. Industry practitioners regularly meet at industry events including the UK’s Children’s Media Conference, Kidscreen in Miami, MipJunior and Cartoon Forum in France and Germany’s Prix Jeunesse. The industry, like all media industries, is a far from cohesive whole, particularly given the contrasting funding structures, business models and purposes of public service and commercial television in the on demand era.

This book discusses children’s television production in and between the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Each case study offers valuable insights into contemporary public service broadcasting’s (PSB) responses to digitization and to children’s viewing of screen content on demand. In the United Kingdom, PSB still dominates the provision of children’s television. The BBC remains largely responsible for the funding and distribution of domestically produced, first-run children’s television and thus has an enormously influential role in the children’s television production ecology (Steemers 2010). Concern about the lack of public service provision for UK children (Ofcom 2018b) led to the introduction of significant extra resources for children’s television in 2019, including a Young Audiences Content Fund (YACF), and increased funding for the BBC. These were also intended to counter the growing popularity of streaming services like Netflix and YouTube with UK children. Australia has had a mixed system of public service and commercial broadcasting in which advertiser-supported linear networks have been dominant since television’s 1956 introduction in that country (O’Regan 1993).

Commercial linear television has been the site of Australian media policy instruments intended to secure supplies of high-quality age-specific programmes for the child audience since the late 1970s. The continued reliance on the use of quotas for children’s television including drama, despite contemporary children’s lack of engagement with commercial linear television services, is indicative of the policy drift and inertia that threaten the children’s television industries in Australia. Digitization and fragmentation have seen public service broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) (that operates without any content quotas) become an increasingly important source of funding, and a key platform, for Australian children’s television. This is primarily through its children’s channel ABCME, established in 2009, its streaming service iView and its children’s apps. No publicly funded system of broadcasting exists in New Zealand, a small country of only 5 million people operating without public service requirements on its advertiser-supported networks. New Zealand has however had a system of contestable funding for local audio-visual content including children’s since 1999, and launched an innovative, publicly funded children’s streaming service, HEIHEI in 2018. The contrasts between the three countries’ television systems, their differing market interventions to ensure children have access to age-specific high-quality television that situates them in their own cultural context, and the production cultures and programmes that have emerged as a result are instructive. Although each country views children as a special television audience, and one deserving of high-quality local content, their children’s television production industries have recently undergone a period of disruption and transformation and are part of increasingly globalized media industries. So this comparative analysis of the three countries also explains and analyses some of the ways in which television producers engage with, and resist, processes of globalization, and the intersections between national policy regimes and global media industries.

Why is children’s television special?

Children’s television production, particularly in small countries, is a form of television that has always been at risk of market failure in advertiser-supported linear television systems. The provision of children’s television is therefore a defining characteristic of PSB (Buckingham et al.1999). Public service television for children is expected to contribute to its audience’s education, socialization and civic development, and to the achievement of the goals of national cultural representation, by reflecting children’s daily lives back to them. These expectations are rarely placed on television made for adults (Messenger Davies 2010; Steemers 2010). Children’s status as a special television audience and the fact childhood is ‘historically, culturally and socially variable’ (Buckingham 2000: 6) also ensure that children’s television attracts significant regulatory and public attention. In 2016, for example, over a thousand people complained to the BBC (even though the series did not actually air on the BBC) about an episode of the preschool animation Fireman Sam. The episode in question, ‘Troubled Waters’ appeared to show the character Elvis slipping on a page of the Koran (Potter 2017b). Regulators have grappled with the challenges of preventing children from viewing unsuitable material while ensuring supplies of beneficial programming since television’s inception. Policy instruments regulating children’s access to television also vary from country to country, reflecting geographically located ‘fundamental assumptions’ about what it is to be a child (Buckingham 2005: 469). Producers in turn have their own subjective understanding of the children who constitute their audiences, an understanding that coexists with a pragmatic recognition of the need for their programmes to circulate easily in global markets and in multiple cultural contexts (Potter 2015).

The different functions ascribed to children’s television and long-standing societal concerns about children’s engagement with the medium, render its production far more complex than television made for adults. Audience ratings for television made for adult audiences and distributed by advertiser-funded linear broadcasters have enormous impact on that television. Programmes and series that rate highly are critically important, because ratings determine the price of advertising (Cunningham and Turner 2000). Programming that fails to resonate with audiences and deliver them to advertisers will be axed, sometimes mid-series, because of its effects on channel revenues. In contrast, as a result of the lack of advertising revenue associated with the child audience, linear commercial broadcasters have little interest in the performance of their children’s programmes. This ‘benign neglect’ can paradoxically enhance producers’ creative autonomy, allowing them to fly beneath the corporate radar. The lack of relevance of programme ratings and advertising revenues to children’s television can also have a detrimental effect on scheduling. Jonathan Shiff’s breakout hit H20:Just Add Water (2006) was transmitted in prime time on subscriber-supported service Nickelodeon in the United Kingdom and the United States but premiered on Australia’s Network 10 at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, because of its lack of associated revenue. On the other hand, although public service broadcasters’ purported lack of interest in ratings fosters diverse and edgier children’s television, public service obligations to the child audience imbue commissioning editors with greater responsibility and involvement in its production. Commissioning editors’ responsibilities may include editorial approval of script, casting and music for example, all of which entail creative input in the production processes, and encroach on producers’ creative autonomy.

The funding structures of children’s television also differ from adults’ television. Linear broadcasters are accustomed to paying lower licence fees for children’s television, partly because of the low advertising revenues associated with this audience but also because they recognize the value of a programme’s exposure on a popular platform, such as the BBC’s, to the promotion of its licensed products and merchandise (Potter 2017a; Steemers 2010). Indeed anecdotal evidence suggests some broadcasters might prefer production companies to pay for their programme brand’s exposure on their networks, rather than contributing to its licence fees themselves. The funding of children’s television, particularly animation, may therefore involve several financing partners, from national and international sources. These will often include both commercial and public service television services, as in the case of Cheeky Little Media’s Bottersnikes and Gumbles, an unofficial co-production between Netflix and the BBC. The processes of children’s television production become more complex, because these financial conditions encourage dispersed production practices across multiple sites and territories, partly to ensure each investor has a piece of the production pie, but also to access the most cost-effective sources of skilled creative labour, and most favourable government inducements (Curtin and Sanson 2016). Dispersed production practices, and the involvement of multiple stakeholders can render the creation of children’s television a collaborative endeavour occurring across multiple locations, time zones and cultural contexts. These arrangements challenge producers’ project management skills and creativity autonomy, while also increasing production costs, given several producers may be involved in a single series, based in different locations. The producers of Pukeko Pictures/ITV Studios Thunderbirds Are Go (2015–17) for example were based in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, while the show’s writers were located in Los Angeles and its animation was undertaken in China.

Finally, the gendered nature of creative labour in children’s television is striking and unusual compared to other media industries. Without a doubt, children’s television is a feminized profession (Lemish 2010: 102). Traditionally all levels of children’s television production have been dominated by women, with the exception of technical roles (e.g. animators, cameras and lighting). A sustained tradition exists in both the public and the private television sectors of female gatekeepers in children’s television, particularly heads of departments, commissioning editors and producers themselves. As Dafna Lemish observes (2010), the preponderance of women in the sector may be because creating television for children is seen in some way as an extension of the private sphere work of caring for children. It may also be because the children’s television industry is fairly young, compared with other media industries, so women have been able to work their way up through the ranks without male domination. The fact children’s television has a lower status, makes less money and pays less to its practitioners is an additional and compelling reason for the feminization of its labour force (Lemish 2010). Of the reasons offered by Lemish the latter seems most credible. As one senior executive said to me recently ‘The feeling is there’s no money in kids, so women can have it’. Clearly there is money in the highly commercialized children’s television offered by global brands like Disney and Nickelodeon, involvement in the creation of public service children’s television however has never been a particularly lucrative endeavour. While preschool properties including those licensed by public service broadcasters, such as Charlie and Lola, Sesame St and Teletubbies have generated very significant revenues, this is by no means true of all preschool television brands, and generally constitutes only ‘a handful of properties’ globally (Steemers 2010: 154). Lucrative licensed products are even less commonly associated with school-age children’s television, particularly live action drama, which rarely generates sufficient series volume to provide merchandising opportunities (Potter 2015).

Why study producers?

In studying the production of children’s television, we can extrapolate findings from its creators’ responses to the pressures and opportunities created by digitization and Internet distribution to media industries more broadly. Despite a growing body of production culture and media industries research, extended and wide-ranging conversations with television producers about their professional and creative practice remain relatively rare, particularly beyond the American context. This absence is partly because much recent media industries and production studies scholarship has explicitly rejected film studies’ historic preoccupation with the auteur (typically the film director) or single creative force equivalent to the author of a novel. As a consequence many key production culture texts have placed their emphases on below the line practitioners, or seek to broaden questions of authorship and authority so that the term ‘producer’ covers the range of practitioners involved in the creation of television (Banks et al. 2016; Caldwell 2009; Mayer et al. 2009). It is also a reflection of television studies’ genealogy, deriving in part from cultural studies and its interest in audiences and uses of cultural texts rather than the production of the texts themselves. The special status of the child audience has also encouraged a long tradition of academic scrutiny of the effects of television on children, the meaning of children’s television texts and the educational benefits television can bestow. Much of the research about children’s television has been part therefore of scholarly traditions grounded in psychology, education, health, sociology and cultural studies, and legal and regulatory studies. As such it has been predominantly concerned with television’s effects on children’s education, well-being and cognitive development rather than on its production (Pecora et al. 2007). The limited scholarship that does foreground interviews with producers includes Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley’s ground-breaking study of 1970s US television drama production, The Producers Medium (Newcomb and Alley 1983). Its revealing interviews with eleven white, male producers, all of whom were enjoying their creativity autonomy at the height of America’s three network era, confirm the absolute centrality of the producer (and indeed the producer-writer) to television’s creation (Perren and Schatz 2015). Robert Kubey’s 2003 study Creating Television: Conversations with the People Behind 50 Years of American TV contains an extended series of interviews with writers, agents, actors, directors and producers. While these interviews offer valuable insights into industrial practices, Kubey’s work diminishes somewhat the individual producer’s creative autonomy, emphasizing instead the collective nature of television production (Kubey 2003). More recent work on scripted television has emphasized the role of the showrunner, ‘the big brain of an episodic television series and the executor of the ordered number of scripts for a given season’ (Bennett 2014: 19). In this work, as in that of Newcomb and Alley, and Kubey, the starting point is that understanding producing is key to understanding how television is created. Despite their obvious and enduring merit, they apply only to the US context, and their focus is television made for adults.

The absence of producers’ voices is particularly obvious in children’s television scholarship. Research into the relationship between children and the media has often ignored the people, institutions and industries responsible for creating content for this special audience. As a result, extended studies of the production cultures of children’s screen media and the economic, institutional and policy circumstances in which producers operate are rare, with some exceptions (see Bryant 2007; Lemish 2010; Potter 2015; Steemers 2010). Very little extended analysis has been done either with children’s television producers regarding their assumptions and beliefs about the children for whom they are making television. Those that exist made important contributions but are now quite dated (Palmer 1986; Buckingham et al. 1999).

As Dafna Lemish notes in her own compelling, comprehensive study of the producers’ attitudes to issue related to gender portrayal, Screening Gender on Children’s Television (2010):

Critical studies of the production domains of television for children are few and far between […] we know very little about what media professionals assume and expect of their audiences, and what roles they assign themselves.

(Lemish 2010: xiv)

Lemish’s international, longitudinal study draws on interviews she conducted with 135 producers of children’s television over five years. Her use of extensive and extended direct quotes represents an important contribution to addressing the pronounced absence of producers’ voices in production culture research. As such it is a notable and enduring exception to the broader scholarly failure to engage with producers, particularly children’s television producers. As Lemish herself observes however, despite her strenuous efforts to interview producers from as many countries as possible, American voices dominate the interview material in the