Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a function the place we’ll shine a highlight on key executives and corporations exterior of the U.S shaking up the offshore market. This week, we’re speaking to Turkish TV powerhouse Tims & B Productions. The firm is coming off the again of launching new drama Another Love in Mipcom final month and Selin Arat, Director of International Operations on the firm reveals what subsequent steps are for the prolific producer and why Turkish TV content material will proceed to punch above its weight within the worldwide enviornment.
When rival producers Timur Savcı and Burak Sağyaşar determined to affix their two manufacturing outfits – Savcı’s Tims Productions and Sağyaşar’s Bi Yapım – in 2017, it marked a union of two of Turkey’s most distinguished creators of tv content material. Savcı had been the producer behind Ottoman interval drama Magnificent Century, a worldwide phenomenon that’s largely thought of because the catalyst for the nation’s tv increase, whereas producer-actor Sağyaşar had made the vastly fashionable comedy-drama Hayat, which aired in additional than 30 nations worldwide.
In the final 5 years, the corporate has carved itself into one of the profitable manufacturing banners in Turkey, producing a raft of genres from drama, fantasy, dystopia and melodrama for linear broadcasters and world platforms. Last month at Mipcom, the corporate launched its most up-to-date native success Another Love, which premiered on Fox Turkey in September to rave opinions. The present, which reunites Hayat stars Hande Erçel and Burak Deniz and is being bought by Global Agency, tells the story of an anchorman with dissociative identification dysfunction and a prosecutor who’re drawn into an affair fueled with ardour and stress as they each search to disclose the darkish reality a couple of mysterious serial killer.
“Their chemistry on screen is almost tangible,” says Selin Arat, Director of International Operations at Tims & B, of the main actors. “Turkish dramas can sometimes get repetitive in terms of their subject matter or their way of dealing with a particular product or subject, but as a company that tries to innovate itself and innovate the genres that it creates, we wanted to bring this darker side into the game because our writer [Ethem Özışık] is so good at such subject matters.”
While psychological well being points have been touched on in the previous few years in Turkey, Arat says Another Love is the “first Turkish series to feature a protagonist with a split personality disorder.”
“Turkish dramas are tackling these subjects more and more, but split personality is a very difficult thing to work with and it will be a challenge for us but that’s why it’s so exciting and stimulating,” says Arat. “It’s a Turkish drama at its core but without losing the love element. It’s looking at more Western-style dramas in that sense. There are more criminal thriller elements to this that we wanted to try and work with.”
And it’s labored. The first and second episodes of Another Love had been probably the most watched collection within the business demographic group on the day they aired, producing near 300,000 tweets. (Read extra about Another Love, which was chosen for Deadline’s Global Breakout this week, right here).
Additionally, the corporate’s acclaimed drama collection Bitter Lands, which follows a legendary love that begins in Istanbul in the course of the Seventies and continues in southern Turkey by means of trials of evil, ambition and tyranny, captivated audiences for 4 seasons. It was distributed to greater than 55 nations worldwide and was successful not solely in nations which have lengthy acquired Turkish content material akin to Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, but additionally extra Western European nations akin to Spain and Italy. For the latter, the collection broadcast on Mediaset reached a mean share of two.7 million viewers, with an viewers share of 24%.
Further initiatives akin to fantasy-drama Shahmaran and dystopian drama Hot Skull turned massive hits for Netflix after they aired on the streamer this 12 months and final 12 months respectively. Both initiatives entered Netflix’s high 10 record for Non-English TV collection.
A Magnificent History
Indeed, there have been a raft of modern-day successes for Tims & B since Savcı and Sağyaşar merged their corporations six years in the past, however the firm has been constructing upon some very strong foundations.
“I first came to Tims because of my background in cinema,” says Arat, who began at Tims in 2009. “I was supposed to set up a film department within the company but at the time my boss said to me, ‘Selin, we’re working on this project called Magnificent Century and it’s huge and we cannot deal with film right now.’ The rest is television history.”
The epic collection primarily based on the life and the courtroom of Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, the longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, shattered Turkish tv data when it started airing in 2011, with greater than a 3rd of primetime viewers watching the 90-minute episodes every week.
It aired in additional than 140 nations and was watched by greater than 500 million individuals worldwide. Arat recollects after they acquired first acquired a request from Russia “who hadn’t licensed something from Turkey for years” that they had been “very, very excited.”
“They wanted to try it out with a few episodes, so we gave it to them, and it became such a huge hit that it caused an outcry from the public when they had to stop airing it because they had to wait for the rest of the episodes from our company,” she says.
Today, Magnificent Century continues to be acknowledged as one of the influential and beloved Turkish tv exhibits on this century because of its fashionable forged, which incorporates Halit Ergenç and Meryem Uzerli and its high-production worth. And whereas Arat gained’t reveal particular numbers, she does be aware that it’s the most costly Turkish collection ever made.
Wanting to proceed to use this IP while additionally furthering its mission to be a pioneer within the native and world leisure enterprise, Tims & B partnered with metaverse platform The Sandbox earlier this 12 months to launch Magnificent Century into the digital gaming sphere. It’s the second collection to enter Sandbox’s metaverse after The Walking Dead. Launched in Paris this summer time, recreation gamers can now create their very own experiences utilizing each unique and established characters and worlds.
Reflecting on the facility of this IP right now, Arat says, “I understand now that all the work that we have put into it is paying back. It’s one of our evergreen projects and it’s still being licensed and re-licensed. It’s just really a phenomenon. In terms of visual quality, given its production year, it may not be as high as other period dramas that are circling around the world, but it has such a powerful story and such a potent way of conveying the story that it’s rewarding to see that it still reaches out to people.”
Next steps
Turkey has lengthy been one of many world’s largest exporters of tv content material, with markets like Latin America, South America, the Middle East and Balkan nations traditionally being a number of the largest customers of collection from the nation. Turkish collection, that are sometimes called telenovelas resulting from their dramatic type and size, have lengthy been engaging to Spanish-speaking markets as their novelas, which frequently are centered on household and dramatic characters, resonate with Spanish-speaking audiences. But, says Arat, it’s vital that the Turkish trade doesn’t relaxation on its laurels.
“Turkish series are still number two in the world,” she says. “But we have a very strong competition coming up from Spain actually and from Latin America coming back to creating premium top tier shows. So, we are under competition. Also, I must say the entry of digital platforms into the Turkish market has juggled things around a bit.”
She’s referring to the deep pockets of streamers which allows them to, at instances, pay greater salaries to forged and crew. In Turkey, notes Arat, exhibits are sometimes shot for a complete week proper earlier than the subsequent week’s broadcast.
“Nobody does this in the rest of the world, everyone shoots back-to-back episodes and put them aside and do their editing and then they start airing it after everything’s ready – but we run a weekly marathon,” she says.
But she has a hunch that the transfer to linear TV is likely to be returning. “The boom might be coming back because people are embracing linear television more strongly and this is where we get to actually reflect the Turkish DNA of TV dramas that are working so well all around the world,” she says. “When you go into the digital platform sphere, it kind of changes the game a little bit because episode duration is shorter and since you’re on a global platform and you have all of these different ideas that you want to play with but that takes you away from your actual core and your innate values. Sometimes, it can kind of kill the magic.”
Up subsequent, Tims & B is creating a brand new interval drama tailored from a best-selling novel. This, says the corporate, is deliberate to be the highest-budgeted Turkish collection ever, surpassing even Magnificent Century.
While Arat can’t reveal a lot but, she does say that the scope of its finances means it should be a multi-national co-production.
“There isn’t one streamer that’s able to finance this project on its own so it will have to be a co-production because the scope of the project is so big,” she says of the brand new challenge. “But if we can manage it, it is sure to be our next hit after Magnificent Century.”
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