Jóhanna Gísladóttir, (pictured) Head of Iceland’s leading subscription based TV station Stöð 2 /Channel 2 has outlined to nordiskfilmogtvfond.com her company’s Drama strategy and upcoming projects.

Could you explain how Stöð 2 /Channel 2’s Drama department is run within 365 group –do you have an in-house drama department or do you only outsource Drama series?
Jóhanna Gísladóttir
: I acquire and commission TV drama with my colleague Berglind Osk Kjartansdottir and Gisli Berg our Head of Production. Our drama series are outsourced and co-produced for the most part with Sagafilm and now RVK Studios, run by Baltasar Kormákur. We also collaborate with smaller players as we’re always open to new ideas and want to support the growth of the Icelandic TV industry. Internally, we produce mostly factual, reality and entertainment series and have in recent months been starting to experiment with short children’s programming and lower budget comedy series.

What is your budget for scripted content and what slots are available for drama series?
JG:
Our budget for local scripted content is about a quarter of our overall budget for Icelandic programmes. Our overall budget for Icelandic programmes has been growing and we will see an increase in our investment in scripted content next year. Drama is on Sunday nights when people traditionally gather in front of the TV and we have also aired some comedy series on Saturday nights. This season (January to April) a big part of our in-house production budget was invested in the Icelandic version of Got Talent so we did not have a drama series running at the same time. However this fall, we will air Sagafilm’s upcoming series Case (9X45’), a spin-off of the popular TV drama Réttur (The Court). It just started filming, with Baldvin Z behind the camera.

What is your editorial strategy?
JG:
Our goal is to have at least one event TV drama series every season. Crime has been our focus as that has always done well and also comedy, such as Ástríður. We have been using proven concepts in the past years, with returning seasons of The Court, Ástríður, The Press

We are now looking to broaden our scope and start some new concepts for 2016 and onwards. This fall we will have Sagafilm’s Case and for 2016 we have commissioned to RVK Studios the comedy drama The Mayor. It’s a satire about a mayor and his entourage, written by the former mayor of Reykjavik Jón Gnarr who also stars in it. We are also working with RVK Studios on another ambitious series, the mystic-fantasy thriller Katla, currently in development. It’s about a woman working for a rescue team, dealing with her past while drilling under a glacier to try to find a team of scientists who disappeared. It will be RVK Studios’ next major TV project after Trapped.

Next to high profile outsourced dramas, we fully financed low budget comedies such as Hreinn Skjöldur (Clean Slate) produced by Hlaturskast. It was aired in November 2014 - January 2015 on Channel 2. Next in our slate is Þær Tvær (Those Two) featuring two actresses who just graduated from Iceland’s drama school. It is set to air in June. Channel 2 has in the past given new talents and unknown faces a chance to start their career and many have become well known and successful in Iceland. We consider all ideas that come to our table and in many instances do pilots or test scenes to see how it works out. Those Two is the result of over a year’s process in developing the idea and the talents and we are very excited to see the result.

What are the current challenges facing Icelandic TV drama?
JG:
One problem is that there is not enough competition from content creators which pushes prices up. This has resulted in the fact that we have been reserved in taking on new concepts of a larger scale and therefore focused on proven concepts. We hope that by expanding our scope in the next year the Icelandic TV market will become more creative and diverse. It is a risk but with the quality constantly improving and ambition of Icelandic producers I think it will be worth taking. Another problem is that the Icelandic Film Centre’s budget has been cut so they tend to focus on large scale TV drama projects, at the expense of smaller projects. This limits the number of drama series we are able to commission each year hence increasing the diversity problem I mentioned before.

How do you tackle the lack of skilled writers?
JG:
I don’t see that we have a lack of skilled writers. Icelandic writers have been growing tremendously and the TV industry is benefitting from the developments in Icelandic film.

The series Blóðberg (Homecoming) premiered recently on Channel 2, then in Icelandic cinemas. How successful was this innovative release strategy?
JG:
We actually decided to run it as a feature film, not a two-part drama as was originally planned. This worked well for us and the movie had over 40% rating with our subscribers (13.6% of total viewership in the age group 12-49) on Easter Sunday. It was released in cinemas about a week later and has not done very well at the box office so far. I think it was a great experiment being able to provide our subscribers with a high quality Icelandic feature film before anyone else. Producers need to think whether this is appealing because for such a small market, TV rights can equal substantial box office income and can be secured before production compared to box office which can of course fluctuate greatly.

What Nordic TV dramas have you acquired recently?
JG:
We’ve aired a few Danish dramas in the past five years, and have acquired most recently Rita Season 3, we also aired the first two seasons. Icelandic audiences are opening up to other Nordic languages besides Danish so our goal is to air more Swedish and Norwegian dramas in the future.

Has Netflix had an impact on your share of the subscription market?
JG:
We are the biggest pay TV channel in Iceland and our subscriber base has increased by 12% in 2014. Netflix has not officially launched in our market but still we’ve done research showing that they have nearly 20,000 subscribers. Their presence has had an impact on us because many of the major series that we acquire from Hollywood studios are also shown on Netflix. We try to compensate now by commissioning more Icelandic dramas. In addition we have launched a SVOD service for our subscribers so they can binge watch whole seasons of our series whenever they prefer.