Over the past two years, there’s been a sentence going around British TV that sounds a lot like a nervous joke told by people who aren’t sure if it’s funny anymore. The phrase of the year was “survive until 2025.” It seems that this year’s theme is “hang in there until 2026.” That’s not the tone you’d expect from one of the world’s most renowned creative industries. Still, here we are.
It’s hard to ignore the numbers that the British Film Institute just released. Last year, UK broadcasters spent about a quarter less on premium TV shows (those that cost at least £1 million an hour to make). This was the lowest amount they had spent on these shows since 2019. It’s not a blip. That looks like the start of a pattern.
It’s harder to see this happen because the decline is happening at a time when art is really respected. British TV isn’t having a hard time because the quality got worse. As of now, Wolf Hall is still one of the best period dramas ever made. People still talk about Chernobyl when they talk about the best TV writing. The Crown had six seasons and became a big deal around the world. Good job on the work. More and more, the money isn’t there to support it.
Last month, Peter Kosminsky, who directed Wolf Hall, told MPs on the culture select committee that he, star Mark Rylance, and others who worked on the project had to take big pay cuts just to make a second season. A streamer would not help pay for it. Just think about that for a second: a BBC drama that won a Golden Globe and got great reviews from critics all over the world couldn’t get outside funding for a follow-up. That’s not a failure of creativity. That has to do with structure.
The current pressure has its roots in ten years of very fast, almost dizzying growth. When Netflix came out in the UK in 2012, it started a race to make more content that changed the whole industry. The market for high-end TVs was worth more than £5 billion by 2022. Streamers put a lot of money into global distribution agreements, co-productions, and deals for rights. The BBC could make a deal with Netflix, like it did with Peaky Blinders in 2014. Suddenly, a British drama had viewers all over the world, and the costs of making it were split. A lot of things could have been done but weren’t because of that model.
At that point, the streamers moved back. Not dramatically or all at once, but slowly and carefully. Now that platforms like Netflix were more focused on making money than getting more subscribers, they became pickier, wanted to own rights outright, and were much less willing to work with others to fund their projects. Since the peak, almost two billion pounds a year has been taken out of the premium TV market. Wayne Garvie of Sony Pictures Television says it straight out: pre-sales in the United States have stopped. That is what he says is the main issue.
Before the streamers pulled back, public service broadcasters like the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 were already having a hard time making ends meet. A drop in advertising, years of no change in the BBC license fee, and sharp rises in production costs due to UK inflation all came together to make a kind of perfect storm. The BBC’s drama director has said that the company can’t afford to pay for shows all by itself and needs partnerships with other companies to stay in business.
Sister, the company that made both Chernobyl and Black Doves, run by Jane Featherstone, has called the situation a “tipping point.” Some people in the industry would say that word is a little too dramatic; they’d rather call it a market correction than a disaster, and there’s some truth to that. The business world has dealt with shocks in the past. There have been big changes in the advertising market, like Covid and the Hollywood strikes, but the industry is still standing.
For now, though, smaller production companies are going out of business or merging out of necessity, not because they want to. The most pressure is being put on British TV producers who aren’t big enough to absorb losses but are also creative enough to make truly original work. Some people in the industry want the government to change or add to tax breaks for high-end TV production, especially for shows that make between £2 and £3 million per hour, which is the middle of the market right now.
It’s still not clear if that kind of action will be taken or if the market will just level off on its own in the next year or two as cautious American buyers return to British content. One thing that is clear is that British TV can’t just wait. Modern shows, the ones that people all over the world love and watch, were made using a method that doesn’t work as well as it used to. The most important thing for the industry to talk about right now is probably whether to rebuild it or get something more durable instead.
