With global content budgets tightening, Michael Frislev and Chad Oakes, co-founders and co-chairmen of Calgary-based Nomadic Pictures, see more opportunity for Canadian producers to step in as international coproduction partners.

Case in point? The 8 x 60-minute Prime Video series House of David, a non-treaty coproduction between Amazon MGM Studios, Nomadic, Santa Monica-based Wonder Project and Athens’ Argonauts Productions alongside Kingdom Story Company and Lionsgate Television.

With its first three episodes having premiered globally yesterday (Feb. 27) on the streamer, House of David is a retelling of the biblical story of the shepherd who eventually becomes the king of Israel. Its global cast includes Michael Iskander (pictured), Ayelet Zurer, Stephen Lang, Indy Lewis, Ali Suliman and Canadian actor Louis Ferreira.

Oakes tells Playback Daily that Nomadic (Fargo, Wilderness) had been working with executives from Wonder Project on the series since September 2022 — well before the faith-based California prodco was founded by Jon Erwin (The Jesus Revolution) in late 2023.. The series is created by Erwin, who also serves as a writer and co-director.

Other executive producers include Wonder Project’s Justin Rosenblatt and Jon Gunn, as well as Vancouver-based Jonathan Lloyd Walker, who also serves as co-showrunner and writer.

Frislev says Nomadic led the charge to shoot the project in Greece, bringing Argonauts onboard as a services company in 2023. This was thanks to Nomadic’s long relationship with Montreal-based producer Joe Iacono who executive produced David Cronenberg’s 2021 feature Crimes of the Future with Argonauts Productions.

“A lot of the architecture [of the time] wasn’t necessarily completely available to us, and Greece, topography-wise, looked a lot like the ancient Israel that we wanted to create,” says Walker.

Nomadic accessed B.C. production services tax credit and the Alberta film and television tax credit, while Argonauts tapped into the Greek incentive Ekome, which Frislev says was a “huge factor” for shooting in Greece aside from its locale doubling for ancient Israel.

“I think Canadians in general are naturally adept at coproduction scenarios,” says Frislev. “There’s always a bridge between cultures and ways of doing things that, if I can say so, require a Canadian touch in order to make everything flow smoothly.”

The Canadian crew brought to the project by Nomadic included several that the prodco had worked with in the past. This included production designers such as Chad Krochuk, Vancouver-based stunt coordinator Kimani Ray-Smith, post-production producer Todd Giroux, first assistant director Michael Shandley and directors Alexandra La Roche and Michael Nankin. Ray-Smith worked with a local Greek stunt team and according to Frislev, Krochuk also interfaced with Erwin and Gunn “to translate their vision” to the Greek art department crew.

Nomadic also brought along a Greek-speaking Canadian line producer, Petros Danabassis, unit production manager Ellen McDonald and production coordinator Ted Emerson.

It was Nomadic that brought on Walker thanks to what Walker called his “long-standing” relationship with Oakes and Frislev, including showrunning series such as Syfy’s Van Helsing (Nomadic, Dynamic Television, Echo Lake Entertainment).

Aside from Greece, there was one day of pickup shooting in a studio in Calgary, and VFX work conducted in Vancouver and Alberta. Principal photography took place from late February to mid-August 2024.

The producers did not disclose the budget for the series, with Frislev only saying “it’s of a scale that merits this kind of production.” Walker, meanwhile, points to Nomadic’s “very long track record of working with American partners” as a key factor for pulling off “a show of this scale.”

Other international coproductions Nomadic has worked on include Netflix miniseries I-Land filmed in the Dominican Republic and the 2008 feature Boot Camp (Nomadic, CD Productions, Edgey Films) which was filmed in Fiji. Season five of Van Helsing shot three episodes in Slovakia. However, in terms of scope, Frislev says House of David is bigger.

Declining domestic commissions are not a uniquely Canadian phenomenon in the current TV ecosystem, and Oakes maintains that global coproductions such as House of David are key to achieving volume for Canadian companies. “We’re still a little Canadian company, but we did $190 million in production last year [with] some stuff that we own, some [projects] that are coproductions and some service production,” he says.

Image courtesy of Prime Video; Photo by Jonathan Prime