White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 8The two large national networks, RAIand Mediaset, are in many ways at theopposite end of the spectrum fromregional televisions, both in terms ofturnover and commitment toproduction. They are arguably thelargest Italian companies in the field ofcultural production, even though theirso-called production of content is partlyoutsourced and most of their resourcesare dedicated to technical andadministrative functions. Even thoughrecent changes in their production andprogramming logic appear strategic, buthave come in a relatively static overallsituation, which in some ways is evendeteriorating.Without going into all the main types ofprogrammes, we will consider one ofthe most relevant areas of productions:television fiction. This category includesmore or less long series but alsominiseries (from two to six episodes), ofwhat in the USA are called “made-for-TV-movies”. The main features oftelevision fiction production were oncevery different from film, but are nowbecoming much more similar, and theirare even cases of relativelyinterchangeable forms. In general,fiction production tends to be in theupper bracket of costs, although forsome time now there have been formsof production reconciling low costs withattempts to preserve good quality usingpermanent sets with professional butrelatively unknown actors, and teams ofscreenwriters well-trained to turn out arelatively standard serial production.Italian television fiction production inthe 21st century has grown considerablythanks to the decision made by bothleading networks – without, however,giving up the enormous imports offoreign series – to invest in the originalproduction of so-called “biopic” seriesfeaturing police officers, detectives,doctors, etc. But it must be said, despitethe fact that there is no lack of highstandardscreenwriters, audiovisualtechnicians and actors, recent Italianfiction has not been winning muchrecognition on the international market.This is mainly due to the Italiancompanies’ rather facile approach to thelogic of series (or other kinds ofprogrammes) based on formats, whichare purchased abroad and then appliedwith a few adaptations. In recent years,Italy has almost exclusively been animporter of formats in all fields (firstlyfrom Holland and then a great variety ofother countries, such as Quebec, Spainand the English-speaking nations), whilethe number of formats exported fromItaly can be counted on one hand.Format series are usually the lowest-costsegment of television fiction. But similarproblems are also found in higherquality productions due to the oftenirrational division of labour between thecommissioning companies and theproducers. The latter will only beginproduction if the big networksguarantee they will buy their productsand therefore there is little room for theelaboration of independent ideas, not tomention assuming the entrepreneurialrisks for the production of even onlypartial products. In turn, the bignetworks will only commission productswhen they have the reasonable securityof an adequate advertising investment,i.e. on the basis of pre-selling at least theidea, if not the product.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 205