Scandinavian success as European policy dilemma: creative Europe’s funding for TV drama co-productions, 2014-20

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the fiction productions that received funding from Creative Europe’s TV Programming scheme 2014–2020. The evaluation shows that most funding went to North-Western Europe with Scandinavia surpassing Europe’s big TV producing nations. The geographical and genre imbalances in the TV scheme must be seen in the light of the long-established close collaboration between Germany and primarily the Scandinavian countries and the profiled position of ‘Nordic Noir’ crime fiction as the engine that drives forward international collaboration. This trend exemplifies European policy dilemmas emerging from television’s role in the intersections of economy and culture. North-European countries appear well-equipped in advance to meet the criteria of Creative Europe through established collaboration, while differences in the media systems and production cultures have kept producers in the South and East of Europe from even applying. The EU funding scheme may, thus, have strengthened already strong relationships rather than creating new ones.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative Europe
• media policy
• co-production
• TV crime series
• TV funding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt – Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives [Grant agreement number 770151]. Various sections of this article have been previously published in deliverables of the DETECt project: Bengesser and Hansen (2021), Hansen and Bengesser (2020a). The material was presented during the online conferences Detecting Europe in Contemporary Crime Narratives (June 2021) and Nordmedia 2021 (August 2021). The article has been thoroughly revised, updated and adjusted for this publication.

2. In the 2014–20 TV Programming Scheme, the maximum funding of €1 million could be given to serial productions of at least 6 episodes, which exceed a production budget of €10 million. Other drama and animation productions could be supported with a maximum of € 500,000 or 12.5% of their budgets. Documentaries could be supported with up to € 300,000 or 20% of the production budget (European Commission 2019, 4). In total 337 projects were funded over the 7-year period. The total of grants distributed was € 92,984,476.00. Of this grant total, 53 percent went to fiction productions.

3. Creative Europe also provides development support for fiction within the scheme Support for Development of Audiovisual Content. The selection results for development indicate a slightly more geographically balanced distribution of funding across the continent than the distribution of funds in the TV Programming Scheme examined in this article. While this different distribution hints to a greater extent towards the idealism incorporated in the Creative Europe as an overall policy instrument, compared to the TV Programming scheme the awards provided by the Development scheme are modest (€50,000 per fiction project compared to €250,000 – €1,000,000).

4. At €749 million, the entire budget for MEDIA 2007 for 32 countries over a period of seven years amounted to about the annual budget of the French film funding body CNC (Crusafon 2015, 91).

5. Matarasso and Landry (1999) have identified 21 dilemmas of cultural policy in Europe, such as heritage vs. the contemporary or public intervention vs. private activity. The unity/diversity and economy/culture dilemmas are implicit in their work, but not explicitly singled out.

6. This includes online interviews with and feedback from Ene Katrine Rasmussen (Head of Office of Creative Europe Desk, Denmark), and an online feedback session with Matteo Solaro (Head of Sector TV Programming), Magdalena Dzbik (Policy Officer, Creative Europe Programme, Media Policy, AV sector support), Emmanuel Joly (Senior Expert, Audiovisual Industry and Media Support Programmes) and Jolien Willemsens (Head of sector for Development, MEDIA subprogramme, Creative Europe).

7. Data from Fontaine, Jiminez Pumares, and Grece (2018) refers to the number of fiction titles produced in 2017: SE 28, DK 8; CZ 26, RO 9, HU 9. Poland produced 49 titles, which is on par with the production of the Netherlands (46).

8. More individual reasons relating to the capacity of production companies from Southern and Eastern Europe to apply for the EU scheme have not been examined here. Local Creative Europe desks, according to our informant Ene Katrine Rasmussen (2021), are actively promoting the scheme to independent producers in the region.

9. The international appeal of the crime genre has been researched by a wide range of scholars, including Hansen and Waade (2017), Bondebjerg et al. (2017), and Hansen, Peacock, and Turnbull (2018). The assumption of a wide transcultural appeal of crime narratives was a built-in feature of the research project DETECt (2018–2021), including the official report on transnational VOD platforms (Antoniazzi and Barra 2021). ‘For television, crime drama […] is clearly the most popular genre across Europe’ (Bondebjerg et al. 2017, 223).

10. Additional reasons for the success may be found in the local support structures for applicants to EU schemes, such as the Creative Europe Desk at the Danish Film Institute, which has sustained experience in advising Danish applicants and has widely promoted the TV Programming scheme (Rasmussen 2021) .

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [Grant agreement number 770151].

Notes on contributors

Cathrin Bengesser

Cathrin Bengesser is an Assistant Professor for Digital Media Industries at Aarhus University’s Department of Media and Journalism Studies. Her research focuses on tensions between national and European media policies, European media systems and transnational audiences. She is PI on the AUFF-funded (2021-23) project EUVoD that studies the impact of media systemic differences on the transformation from broadcast to VoD markets in Europe. She is also affiliated to the AHRC-funded research project ‘Screen Encounters with Britain’ (King’s College London). As a Post-Doc (2019-20) in the Horizon 2020 research project DETECt – Detecting Transcultural Identity in Popular European Crime Narratives (2018-21) she was working on the study of European crime TV audiences, the development of DETECt Aarhus App and the European policy perspectives to be gained from the research within the project. Cathrin received her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London (2020) with a thesis investigating the changes in national public service policies and broadcasters’ ensuing strategies for legitimizing themselves within a digital and globalizing media market in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.

Kim Toft Hansen

Kim Toft Hansen is an Associate Professor at Department of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University. His main research areas are television production studies, Nordic television drama, media policy, locations in film and television, crime fiction and Scandinavian film. Recent book publications include Production Design (Samfundslitteratur 2020, co-authored with Naja Aggerholm and Jakob Ion Wille), European Television Crime Drama and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan 2018, co-edited with Steven Peacock and Sue Turnbull), Locating Nordic Noir: From Beck to The Bridge (Palgrave Macmillan 2017, co-authored with Anne Marit Waade) and 1864: tv-serien, historien, kritikken (Aalborg University Press 2016, edited volume). He participated as work package leader in the Horizon 2020 research project DETECt – Detecting Transcultural Identity in Popular European Crime Narratives (2018-21), including special attention towards European production cultures, media policies and television co-production. He is currently developing a new book project on Peripheral locations in European TV crime series (with Valentina Re).