The French series "LuPin" breaks records on "Netflix", after a similar success by the Spanish "La Casa de Papel", in embodying the end of the US domination of television productions, in a direction Driven by the great ambition of European, Latin American and Korean actors.
"Ten years ago, Federation Entertainment founder Pascal Broughton says," 90 percent of the productions originated in the United States. There were small creative productions but they were not exported abroad. "
However, a combination of unprecedented factors changed the equation.
The increase in the speed of the Internet and the growing influence of television services on demand and the model presented by American paid channels, headed by "HBO", have contributed to pushing their counterparts abroad to rely on series, after betting especially on cinema and sports.
The serials produced by the coded "Canal +" channel, including "Carlos" and "Bracco", were a first step in this transformation, before public channels followed suit, with the phenomenon of "Burgen" in Denmark and "Sherlock" in Britain, which were shown in 2010.
Luca Barra, a professor at the Italian University of Bologna, who is one of the authors of a study on TV series in Europe, explains, "I am not sure that this was their intention in the first place, but the producers noticed that what they are doing not only allows them to differentiate in the local market, but that it also concerns other markets." ".
He points out that this "change of mentality" also helped in developing cross-border production structures, especially in Europe, to cope with the steady growth in the production budget.
In parallel, the proliferation of channels and platforms generated a huge appetite for non-consuming content that changed the concept of success.
"There are many programs and the audience is very dispersed, which allows marketing productions that were previously not popular," says Luca Parra.
The emergence of global platforms, especially Netflix, as well as Amazon and finally Disney + also played a major role in this regard.
In addition to the large budgets, Netflix resorted to translating all the works on its platform in addition to dubbing many of them, which allowed a non-English-speaking series such as "Lupine" to be on top of the most watched series on the platform in the world for several days.
To expand their base abroad, US platforms have produced local businesses in several countries, relying on production companies primarily based in their target markets.
In South Korea, and finally in Europe, laws require electronic video services to contribute financially to the audiovisual sector in the country.
In this new landscape of TV production, Americans remain "very strong," as Pascal Bruton concedes, but there is "a real rebalancing" and "the trend is accelerating."
University of Wisconsin professor Jonathan Gray explains that non-American production companies have also entered the line of writing exportable productions, all the way to the United States.
"Americans´ tastes are known for their limitations in terms of television," he says, "but foreign productions have come to realize how to satisfy them," by pushing them away at times, but while preserving their known mark.
As with some English productions, options are increasingly focused on "narrative themes and styles of a much greater international character," according to Pascal Bruton.
Breton explains, "Versailles or Saint-Tropez is an international topic of interest" to viewers around the world, as happened in the Italian Mafia series ("Gomora") and another about Colombian drug dealers ("Narcos").
In the case of "Le Pen," the Louvre is a magnet for viewers, but the success of the work, according to Pascal Broughton, is also due to the style of directing.
He notes that the work "is a bit like the films of Luc Besson, the only director in French cinema who understood the global market." Many of Bison´s associates work behind the camera on "Lupine".
