Buy, Sell, Hold: The Production Company M&A Tea Leaves
With 'Sherlock' and 'Squid Game: The Challenge' producers snapped up, who's next? Plus more burning issues in intl TV right now
Manori Ravindran covers the international TV market from London for Series Business. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive richly reported dispatches from both Manori and Elaine Low for a global perspective on the TV business. This is a standalone subscription separate from The Ankler. For access to Series Business and everything The Ankler publishes, including Sean McNulty's The Wakeup and columns from Richard Rushfield, you can subscribe here.
“I really hope it’s not as bleak as last year,” a PR boss recently complained to me, looking ahead to the Edinburgh International TV Festival, where TV executives gather to chew the fat over the health of the industry and hear directly from broadcasters and streamers about what they’re in the market for.
It will be nothing like last year, I assured this person: It could be worse.
The 2023 festival came amid the Hollywood strikes and U.K. unscripted crisis, which cast a pall over many discussions. A year on, though, 52 percent of the film and TV workforce remains jobless, as per new data from below-the-line union Bectu. So it’s hard to imagine anyone will be in Scotland banging the drum for telly.
In three weeks, I’ll be in Edinburgh leading panels on TV’s freelancers crisis and another on the fraught state of diversity, equity and inclusion in the industry (please introduce yourself if you see me) and engaging in the debate of this year’s most pressing issues, of which there are many.
As the industry rolls into the busy fall months, I’ve put together five pressing questions for the industry — the answers to which, should they materialize over the course of the coming months, will bring change to the industry yet again.
In this issue, we’ll explore:
Netflix facing compliance standards for the factual accuracy of its programming in 2026
Broadcasters like Channel 4’s possible “genre audit” to inform producers what they’re actually buying
The fight to improve freelance working conditions while having to do “less with less”
If funding diverse content is a waste of money
The latest production company M&A deals signs and whether its a sign of a dealmaking boom