In 2024, the United Kingdom became the leading exporter of unscripted TV formats, accounting for one-third of all new adaptations overseas, per research firm K7 Media.
One independent TV producer that benefitted from the rising unscripted wave over the last few years has been Plimsoll Productions, which launched in 2013 and specializes in programming for the natural history genre. In 2022, Plimsoll sold an 80% majority stake to ITV after receiving interest from a total of 17 bidders, valuing it at £131 million ($177.5 million).
In an interview with TheWrap’s Office With a View, Plimsoll CEO Grant Mansfield credited the company’s success to its “no brainer” decision to prioritize work with U.S. buyers early on.
The firm, whose content is distributed in over 100 territories globally, derives 75% of its income from the United States, while the remaining 25% comes from the U.K. Its notable credits include Disney+’s “A Real Bugs Life,” Apple’s “Tiny World,” Netflix’s “Night on Earth” and the upcoming Blumhouse collaboration “Nightmares of Nature,” which will premiere on Netflix next week.
“The barrier for lots of British TV producers is they don’t have the access because they don’t know any of the buyers,” Mansfield explained. “From day one, even though we didn’t have a lot of money, we spent everything we had jumping on planes to go to Los Angeles rather than jumping on trains to go to London. It paid off for us big time because the buyers were kind enough to let me in their front door, but also it was the beginning of the unscripted streaming boom in general. So we had a bit of a strategy, but in truth, I got a bit lucky with the timing as well.”
Prior to launching Plimsoll, Mansfield started his career as a BBC journalist. He would later transition behind the camera, overseeing commissioning for scripted shows at ITV, as well as leading its Granada TV division as director of programs. In the the independent TV sector, he served as the managing director of London’s RDF and CEO of Zodiak USA.
Though Plimsoll’s “north star” has been in the natural history genre, the company has also expanded into live, fashion, entertainment, documentaries and adventure programming as it looks to stay nimble.
“I always say we’re in the entertainment business and that means we’re after ratings ahead of awards,” Mansfield said. “We’d like both if we can get them, but it’s always entertainment first. That does change the way you design your shows, and it’s particularly pertinent at this moment in time in our industry.”
While acknowledging the unscripted TV market has been challenged in the last few years, Mansfield believes there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future.
“I don’t think unscripted producers should be gloomy about the state of market. We’ve got to be realistic,” he said. “You’ve got to box clever and play the market in front of you. The market moves very quickly and sometimes the reason producers feel like there are fewer opportunities is that we don’t move quickly enough to respond to it. There’s a whole bunch of opportunities out there.”
Read on for TheWrap’s full conversation with Mansfield below.
How did you get involved in the natural history genre?
When I was setting the company up, my so-called advisors told me not to do natural history because we wouldn’t be able to own the IP. But I saw things differently.
I could see what was happening in the streaming market. Pretty much all the originations were in drama at that stage, but there were rumblings about them wanting to move into unscripted, and they wanted their unscripted shows in the early days to feel premium and cinematic and that really speaks to natural history. So they jumped into natural history very early on.
What makes us unique as a specialist natural history creator is that we’re a multi-genre producer in the premium space. We always lean in from an entertainment perspective and a lot of our natural history show ideas come from entertainment producers, rather than natural history producers. So that’s a key strength in terms of the ideas that we create.
How much do the unscripted productions you work on cost to produce?
The numbers at the top end have come down, but Plimsoll has made shows literally that cost from $50,000 an hour to $5.5 million dollars an hour. We’re not doing that anymore and but it’s still a pretty wide range. I’d say for producers in the premium space, it ranges from half a million dollars an episode up to $3 million or $4 million.
What made natural history so expensive was that every show was designed around essentially describing the world. So a huge amount of the budget was spent on flying. In factual entertainment, those budgets have never been available. So one simple way of keeping the cost down is the precinct model, which is essentially you create a show around a single precinct.
Nightmares of Nature coming to Netflix is precisely that. It looks many, many million dollars an episode, and it costs less money than it looks because essentially we’ve stayed in the same place. It’s been made at a much more attractive price point. It makes it easier to tell stories in that way.
Why did you sell a majority stake to ITV?
I decided about three or four years ago that the next stage of Plimsoll’s evolution involved a partner that could support our ambitions. I assumed that we’d sell to an American company because that’s where most of our business is.
They have a particular way of running their studios group which makes creative people feel comfortable. We still feel like an independent producer. They own 80% of the company, but they don’t intervene. They let you get on it with but are there for advice and support when you need them.
You’ve had projects picked up by many of the major streamers. What are they looking to buy right now?
This is not supposed to sound facetious but they’re always looking to buy hits.
No genre has a right to be on any platform. There’s an interesting, idiosyncratic, admirable tradition in the UK of public service broadcasting, where the BBC wanted to commission a range of programs almost regardless of the ratings. And that’s great, but it’s not a realistic model for the international market. So we should all be in the business of trying to trying to create hits. And that’s a constant challenge.
There are some particular challenges for some traditional natural history producers. Modernity and storytelling in that genre, in particular, needs to focus around character and narrative rather than spectacle and behavior. Traditionally, it’s the latter that’s taken precedence. It’s the wrong way round. We still want spectacle and behavior, but character and narrative is where it comes from.
Some people are using AI to read some early treatments and that might be useful, but I don’t believe that AI will ever get to a stage where it knows how to commission a hit show.
What’s a major trend in the independent producing space that people should be paying more attention to?
We all have to rightly be much more focused on what I’d call value pricing. We’re a premium unscripted company, we make expensive TV shows, but we need to look at ways that they can be less expensive, because we absolutely recognize it’s a business and people are looking for return on their investment. So there has been an adjustment on that front. But streaming is an incredibly exciting place to be working and it’s about us adapting to the needs of our customers. That’s partly about price and partly about modernity in our storytelling.
Certainly in the unscripted space, it feels like broadcast networks in the U.S. are coming back into play and that’s because the cost of drama is increasing exponentially. So there’s a big opportunity on broadcast networks. But digital and AI are also huge opportunities. Obviously, everybody knows the biggest content platform of the world is now YouTube. There’s a bunch of opportunities there that we should all be jumping into.
There are also enormous opportunities in AI. We just delivered our first pilot entirely created on AI. It’s a really interesting experiment because we did it in house. We have a very large development group by UK standards of about a dozen people working full time in development and nearly a half of them create sizzle reels all the time and are using AI extensively. One has to proceed with a certain amount of caution, authenticity is absolutely critical, but I think there are some really interesting opportunities.
And then there are interesting new funding models emerging which ranges from big investors in America and China to philanthropic investment. So I genuinely feel there’s never been a better time to be in the unscripted TV space, whilst also recognizing it’s been a tough time for some.
How does streaming’s increasing push towards sports and live programming impact your strategy?
Despite the challenging circumstances, streamers are still spending a bit more year on year. But behind those numbers, they are spending an increasing amount of that spend on sports rights. The discretionary spend available for original content is smaller than it was.
Sports, obviously, is a shortcut to finding a large audience, although it’s an expensive way. But there are other things you can do in the live space where you can create your own live events. To a certain extent, even the Tyson-Paul fight is an example of that. I’m sure Netflix paid a small fortune for it, but it’s not like buying sports rights. They created their own pseudo sports event. So live is a big part of the future and not just for streamers. A lot of broadcast networks are looking for them and we are well placed in that space.
We have a department that specializes in live. The most notable show we made was called Earth Live, but we’ve made a bunch of other ones. We are going to produce a big live event for a major American buyer in the early part of next year. It’s a key area of growth.
What do you make of major Hollywood studios increasingly moving productions overseas to areas like the UK?
It’s obviously a big challenge for some producers in America. There are some issues around tax incentives that maybe people on the West Coast need to get their heads around. But from our point of view, we’ve always done nearly all our production here and it’s become easier to do that with the advent of Zoom calls. So that’s a trend that, for selfish reasons, we’d like to see continue, although we’re really happy to produce in the states as well.
What about warnings of looming consolidation in entertainment?
If one is being honest, there are probably too many buyers and too many producers. But to use a natural history term, it’s evolution, isn’t it? It will be survival of the fittest. There’s a constant conversation in the UK about whether the independent sector can sustain the number of companies it has. And the evidence of the last few years is it can’t. That’s why, sadly, a number of them have gone under.
What’s your advice for people looking to break into the industry or advance in their career?
You’ve got to have a healthy appetite for risk. The opportunities have never been bigger, but neither have the risks. This is not a job for somebody that can rely on a 30-year career without experiencing unemployment. Most of the people I know have had periods of unemployment, including some of the most successful ones.
If somebody from the UK was asking me, I would say don’t be too parochial. There’s a lot of brilliant creativity in my country, but for all the brilliant creativity in the UK TV market, it’s so small compared with the bigger TV markets.
Obviously, there are huge TV markets outside the U.S., but the one that matters most is the U.S. because it’s the biggest and everybody speaks English. So anybody in this country looking to develop a long and exciting career in TV, I would say, do what Plimsoll did and look west. You’ve got to be engaged with what’s happening in the United States. It’s the bit of the TV industry that matters most, not by a small fraction, but by a disproportionately huge amount. There’s obviously enormous amounts of money in America, but there’s enormous amounts of innovation as well.
