Demand for docs is high, but so is the pressure to market them in exactly the right money-spinning way. And guess what? ‘Reality’ is SO documentary, at least that’s what some say.

Stephen Ellis, president of Ellis Entertainment in Toronto, sees a trend brought about by a strong marketplace.

‘We’ve certainly had a growth of the majority of U.S. powerhouses: Discovery, A&E, Biography…all with grouped channels, and that is having a profound effect on the market,’ says Ellis.

‘You’ve got to produce something very focused for History or Biography or TLC, and it may be so specific that it’s a tougher sell to a terrestrial. The terrestrial guys are still working to a large audience, they are not as tuned to a narrow demographic as the specialties, which are geared to almost a psychographic.

‘Big new channels are commissioning lots of production, but it’s production that doesn’t have as long a life in the secondary and third rung down,’ says Ellis.

And this, he says, is only magnified in the case of a doc series ‘that’s finely tuned to the needs of a cable network – it may or may not be anyone’s cup of tea in the terrestrial broadcasting world.’

Marina Cordoni, vice-president, distribution at Portfolio Entertainment in Toronto, sees a similar development. ‘What I’m seeing is that investment in blue-chip productions, where you have multiple-million-dollar documentary, and even the BBC or Discovery need to come together to offset that.

‘The challenge is for an independent caster to pick up the higher-end stuff.’

She offers as an example The Living Century, a Portfolio-distributed doc series on centenarians that includes in its opening episode the 107-year-old survivor of the famous New York Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. This doc, Cordoni says, is ‘blue chip because of the subject matter. Although those high-budget docs are a little out of reach for us we can still get great docs. At the end of the day we’re there to service mainly specialty channels. There’s still the need for the lower-budget, quality doc, which is the position we take.’

Ellis takes a different approach. ‘The good news is that with the kinds of resources the specialty guys have you’re able to get a significant chunk of budget and you [possibly] can get a deal for a good part of the world on first release [in the case of related channels]. The bad news is there isn’t a significant after-market, except with start-up channels.’

A possible answer is repurposing – taking original material and recutting it to length or audience requirements.

‘One of the classic examples of that is what CTV is trying to do with the Discovery Channel now they’ve got common ownership. They’re trying to find subjects that will work on Discovery and also work on CTV as a repurposed shorter series,’ says Ellis.

Ellis Entertainment’s own doc Homo The Wild, looking at same-sex relationships, will be available in both a 90-minute version for festivals and an hour for schedule-bound TV.

‘In the documentary world,’ says Ellis, ‘at least you’ve got that ability [to repurpose content] that you don’t have in drama. You need more detail in specialty audiences and less detail and broader appeal for terrestrials. Terrestrials [cannot accommodate] four hours on a narrow topic.’

Whether doc purists and auteurs like it or not, the fact is doc has begun to blur into ‘reality,’ even for distributors and buyers. But again the differing needs of conventional versus specialty channels comes into play.

‘Reality-based TV has grown over this period, the whole idea of what documentary is blurring, that’s clearly a shift. It’s a whole new ball game. It’s a flavor; it’s seen as a distinct flavor of fact-based programming,’ says Ellis.

‘Lifestyle channels have realized there’s an appeal to reality-based stuff that has breathed some new life into that genre. A serious science or history channel isn’t going to find it as appealing.’

Cordoni sees things similarly. ‘Doc and reality are blurring. I think the definition of documentary has expanded into reality, because even the lifestyle shows are documentary programs. If you take Popstars as an example, it’s documenting the lives of these people. It’s a documentary lifestyle show. I think that documentary, reality and lifestyle are all crossing a little bit.

‘I believe the traditional doc buyer is also expanding their horizons, and that applies in particular to networks rather than specialty channels.

‘Networks have the flexibility and the bigger budgets. I believe they have the ability to be flexible and to go into different genres. Who would have thought a show like Survivor would be on the networks? I would have assumed before it began that it was special interest. Networks are the big guns. They have the ability to be flexible and try something out and to do so with money and marketing muscle. And they have the flexibility to pull it off if it’s not working, where specialties need to put more time into building audiences.’

This apparent merging of docs and reality programming does not sit well with all.

‘If there’s a contrivance there it is not a documentary,’ says Barri Cohen, story producer and codirector of Breakthrough Entertainment’s doc series The Family Dance, which focuses on women stuck between their growing families and aging parents.

‘Temptation Island is producer-driven. The producer comes up with a crass idea, casts to fit that crass idea, dangles an incentive for contestants and the hook is the base instincts. It has nothing to do with documentary.’ *

-www.thelivingcentury.com