Veteran HBO Producer Says Budget Cuts Are the New Normal Across TV Now

Jane Tranter, the CEO and co-founder of production company Bad Wolf who counts HBO’s Industry and Succession among her credits, is used to big swings for broadcasters and streamers she makes TV series for.

And count The Other Bennett Sister, a cosy, quietly revolutionary adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s best-selling novel, for the BBC and BritBox among its buyers. “It’s been the biggest hit they’ve every had,” Tranter, the prolific British producer, told The Hollywood Reporter about her collaboration with Britbox on the period drama while attending the MIA Market in Rome.

But after the boom and bust of Peak TV, with the floor having fallen from under U.S. and British co-productions that Bad Wolf has been celebrated for, Tranter, 11 years after launching her Wales-based production juggernaut now majority-owned by Sony, talked about a reset for premium dramas to adjust to declining series expenditures by the American streamers.

“What we’ve found is the budgets are right for the show,” Tranter says of the changing landscape. “Yes the world is changing, and our industry is changing with it, and there is the cost of living crisis everywhere. You can’t expect television budgets to kind of keep increasing, when everywhere else everything is costing more.”

Tranter is still bullish on high end dramas, she later revealed during a fireside chat in Rome. “If someone says to you, ‘you can’t make period dramas, no one’s buying them. You can’t make fantasy. No one is buying it.’ Make it. Just find a way to make it.”

Tranter added she always advises her development team to go against the industry creative flow, to ‘go in the opposite direction of everyone else’s traffic. If everyone is zigging, you should zag because at some point they’re going to want your zag, because they’re fed up with the zigs.”

An example is Apple TV‘s Berlin Noir series, a co-production with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s PlayTone and shot in Berlin, as opposed to the company’s longstanding studio in Cardiff.

There’s another budget strategy for the 10-part The Other Bennet Sister, written by Sarah Quintrell, and which follows the forgotten Bennet sister of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whose move from Longbourn to London offers the wallflower a chance to break free from society’s — and her family’s — rather anti-feminist constraints.

Tranter’s knowledge of cross-Atlantic collaborative financing strategies is a product in part of going to Hollywood after her years at the BBC. “It was a sort of a mecca. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. You sort of make your own mecca is my view today,” she explained.

“It is as tough as everyone says it is,” she added, as Hollywood taught her humility. “You just have to learn to have a strong core. I learnt to love my time there, and I made really good friends and I got incredible insight working with American broadcasters on American dramas.”

But Hollywood also taught Tranter about humility,” because there will always be someone who will look like they are going to make your dreams come true, and then snatch your dreams away a few hours later,” she recalled.

And Hollywood also on her return to the UK offered Tranter an invaluable understanding of what American co-producers of dramas needed, rather than just how much money they had on offer.

Her work in the U.S. included The Night Of, a 2016 HBO crime drama miniseries. “For me, it’s the reason I set up Bad Wolf in Wales, in the way I did,” Tranter recalled of shooting The Night Of in a studio and deciding to shift her studio work to Wales.

“I liked the idea that we could grown an industry, where we could replicate that feeling of family of community and family jobs that I have learned through Jim’s experience in New York,” Tranter said of her collaboration with the late James Gandolfini before his sudden death.

Tranter also executive produced the hit HBO series Succession, for which she exhibits a signature humility. “I was a producer in the smallest possible way,” she added about working on the hit series alongside creator Jesse Armstrong and helping him set up a writers room. “It was one of the nicest, easiest jobs I’ve ever had.”