Banijay’s Steve Matthews Has a TV Job Like No Other, Created a Boot Camp, Sees “No Shame in Being Highly Commercial” and Has Taken on AI
Superindie Banijay Entertainment, the France-headquartered international content production and distribution giant with more than 130 production companies across 23 territories, has a catalog of over 185,000 hours of original programming, including such hits as Survivor, Black Mirror, Marie Antoinette, Peaky Blinders, MasterChef, and Big Brother. And it has an executive role that is unlike most others.
In early 2023, the company hired HBO Europe veteran Steve Matthews as an addition to its central scripted department. The former executive of Octagon Films in Dublin (Love/Hate) and consulting producer on all three seasons of Showtime’s The Borgias, starring Jeremy Irons, has since then worked as content partnerships executive at Banijay. He is tasked with contributing to the production development process, “supporting in driving co-production opportunities across the Nordics, Spain and beyond, and generally building out the business’ pipeline and creative partnerships primarily across drama.”
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Matthews will be speaking at MIPCOM 2024 on Tuesday during a “Drama Co-Production Breakfast” and on a panel entitled “Navigating a Complex Landscape – What Opportunities for Tomorrow’s Fresh, Original Voices?” Among the new shows Banijay will sell at the market are the modern reimagining of the iconic British detective drama Bergerac, based on the original series created by Robert Banks Stewart and starring Damien Molony (The Split, Brassic) from Banijay banner Blacklight TV, The Forge‘s We Go Again (working title), a comedy-drama exploring the highs and lows of Black working-class teenage life, Screentime New Zealand’s A Remarkable Place to Die, about a detective “facing a series of intriguing local homicides, Accidentally Famous, “depicting the rise of Italian pop band 883,” from Groenlandia and Sky Studios, and thriller series Elixir, which revolves around a pharmaceutical scandal, from Banijay Benelux label Topkapi Films and others.
Don’t think of Matthews as a script doctor at Banijay! In his role, he is there for creatives from the development phase. Given that and the fact that developing and putting together dramas takes time, any shows that Matthews has been working on with Banijay Entertainment labels are yet to be unveiled. However, he worked with Banijay units on several HBO Europe series, including with Rubicon on Norwegian sci-fi procedural Beforeigners, with Pokeepsie in Spain on fantasy horror 30 Coins, and with Sweden’s Filmlance on Beartown.
What his new role boils down to is working with and helping the more than 60 scripted labels , from newer up-and-coming banners to award-winning veterans, and creatives across the Banijay roster who are looking for a little bit of extra magic with projects that they see as having the potential to travel beyond their local borders, either on their own or in remake form.
“A lot of other companies that work in a similar way as an umbrella with different companies seem to have different varieties of how much glue there is between the group,” Matthews explained to THR ahead of MIPCOM. “The essential idea is that the actual personnel of Banijay Central is relatively small compared to the vast number of labels there are out there. So there was never going to be a head of development job or anything like that.”
Instead, the labels and banners are trusted to make the shows. “It’s all about them. Having been bought or set up and being part of the Banijay Group, obviously, there’s a business relationship. But then the question was: what else can we add in above that to offer to the production companies? My metaphor is this: We’re in a little helicopter and chugging along. We open the door and look down and say, ’Hi, how are you guys down there? Do you need a bit of extra money from the scripted fund that we have for that co-production, or those rights that you haven’t budgeted for? Do you need help getting the rights to that book? Do you need help getting the format rights for this show that came out of another country? Do you need a couple of days of Steve in a writers’ room to support your development? And if you don’t, fine, we close the door and go on to the next banner, because there are so many of them.’ So it’s about what can we at the center offer as extra support and benefits.”
Matthews explains the support he can offer this what. “What I bring, I suppose, as an elderly script executive from the pensionable days who came up in the ‘90s, is the experience that in theory I have from working on a lot of scripts, especially the last eight years at HBO Europe, particularly the non-English-language market.”
But Banijay sees him helping most on shows targeting a global audience. “I’m not really any use on a tiny little third season of a German sitcom, but where the companies have ambition, which they must have now to be at that top end, I can help,” the executive explained. “It’s about that glocal, local and global, debate. I’m quite attuned, I think, to helping a project find its space between having its roots in a local soil and looking beyond that. So [I help ensure that] a French show is genuinely French, a German show is genuinely German, but is managed in such a way that it’s shaped to give it the best chance in the international market.”
Of course, that must happen in an organic and smart way. “I am old enough to remember the Euro Pudding, which was a German cop chasing a French bad guy with an Italian sidekick across Austria or something, and it all went wrong,” Matthews recalled. “I genuinely believe that the executives and the audiences are far too sophisticated for that to happen again. But if you get it right, that Frenchness or Polishness or Swedishness of a show is an advantage and an attribute to an international market audience, not a disadvantage. So you’re never trying to make it less Swedish.”
His focus is much more on narrative forms and shapes, as well as “genre engines,” he explained. “The show is maybe very Swedish but you need to work on the momentum, the thrill of the genre stuff.”
Matthews is confident that he knows how much input and guidance creatives need without overstepping his boundaries. “That comes from many years of knowing where the line is between me and the writer,” he suggested. “You do the character, you do the local things, but I can help you make it a thriller. I can help you make it a horror show. So don’t try to reduce the localness but try and shape it in such a way that people will find it interesting in a narrative shape that is possible to recognize.”
Among Banijay’s MIPCOM slate is Bergerac. “We’re coming off of that big boom of auteurist shows. I think it’s in a period now that will benefit those companies that want to do a detective franchise and things like that,” Matthews shared. “One of my great mantras is: don’t be afraid of genre. Genre is not anti-art. There’s no shame in reboots. And there’s no shame in being highly commercial.”
That may be particularly important at a time when people are down on the state of the world and avoid the news. “One of the mis-thinkings that sometimes happens when there are recessions or miserable times is: ‘The news is terrible. We must make a lot of really fluffy pink stuff,’” Matthews argued. “But that’s not the case, because we’re seeing true crime rise with bad news, too. So people still like dead bodies. What people like is quality stuff. That’s the key.”
He notes an example from outside Banijay. ”It’s not our show, but Slow Horses is just a well-made show with an amazing twist. You can enjoy it entirely as a spy show, but it’s also bringing you all those other layers.”
How did he come up with the idea of the Banijay Bootcamp and how quickly could it launch? “One of the good things about Banijay is that it does feel quite uncorporate in a lot of ways. I’m quite an uncorporate guy,” Matthews said. “You got a shirt today but you don’t get that every day. The company is very supportive of ideas and initiatives, and that’s what I was looking to do. So I just proposed something.”
The idea was based on his work at the Midpoint Institute, an academic organization tied to Prague University, which he started when “we were looking for talent for HBO back in the day.”
So he organized the Boot Camp with the Midpoint team. “A number of teams of writer and producer come in with an idea and work that idea across a period of time,” Matthews explained the Midpoint process. ”After workshopping it for four days, go away, write a first draft, come back, and workshop the script.”
The key Banijay tweak to the idea is to pick creatives from different countries and production labels across the company. “So we told everyone: ‘If you’re interested, please send over an idea with one of your development executives and a writer,” Matthews recalled. Working on five or six ideas would ensure an exchange of ideas and skills, collaboration, feedback, continuing education, and maybe even new connections for possible future co-productions. “A great win would be if one of those projects got into development and got made,” he added. ”But you always have to manage expectations. Of course, I hope that will happen, and there’s every chance you could but it’s not really what it’s about. It’s really about supporting skills. Hopefully we’re going to make that idea better and give it a chance of being sold.”
However, the Boot Camp is not meant for obviously commercial projects. “It is very important that we don’t get the ideas that are going to get made anyway,” explained Matthews. “There’s got to be a bit of risk. Otherwise, there is no point of doing it.”
How does the Boot Camp fit into the post-peak TV era of the industry? “One of the impacts of the boom was that talent became very confident, which is great, and also had a great deal of power,” argued Matthews. “As the old-school development executive whose job it was to engage with talent in a meaningful way, I think there’s a generation here that’s lacking skills of creating dynamic development executives who can really handle big talent coming through. So I thought maybe I can support the career advancement of the emerging development executives across the group.”
With many players looking for co-production opportunities after the end of peak spending in streaming and beyond, the Boot Camp could also help on the front. “Banijay has created a big thing out of lots of little companies and has continued to encourage the little elements to be their own identities as much as possible. But that comes with complexities,” explained Matthews. “So a lot of it is about consistently introducing things to each other across the group. So we’re saying: ‘these guys are looking for a thriller.’ And we’re clearly going into a co-production game now. So, introducing people, supporting development, executive skills, supporting local, emergent writers hopefully, is key.”
Matthews has also focused on the future in terms of technology, twice taking on AI software at events in showdowns promoted as “Steve vs. The Machine.” “There was a point a year or 18 months ago when everybody was starting to talk about it. And we are still talking about it,” he said. “But what does it mean for writers and writers rooms and so forth?”
To explore those questions, Matthews squared off with a Swedish AI company’s program supporting writers at the Gothenburg Film Festival. “I was given a five-line idea on stage, and I had to say what I would talk to the writer about. Here’s how I would develop this,” Matthews recalled. “And then we took it to the AI and asked it a bunch of questions.”
The AI was declared the winner. “It wasn’t really a defeat. I think that was a draw really,” argued the exec. “We asked it some questions and to give us 10 ideas for this or that. And they asked me when I think this would be useful? And I said: when a writer is stuck.”
Matthews’ biggest takeway: “I was scared of it, like everybody else, because everybody’s scared of technology. But now I see it is another tool. We’re also not frightened of typewriters or word processors.”
And he quips: “AI is more likely to reach consciousness, become Skynet [from Terminator] and enslave the human race long before it can write a good episode of Succession. It’s just not going to do that. But being in the room to generate 100 ideas, I see no problem with that at all.”
His second showdown with AI took place at the Sarajevo Film Festival and was slightly different. “I had a writer sitting next to me and was given two five-line ideas for a crime show. One of these was written by the computer, and one of these was written by the nice young man sitting next to you. ‘Guess which one it was?’” Matthews explained. And I did so correctly, so I won that one. But it’s mostly a bit of fun, and I certainly have learned to be less afraid of it. I can now see what it is as a tool.”
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