From Versailles to No Man’s Land: French broadcasters and the new geopolitical reality of the audiovisual industry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on the examples of Versailles, a series co-produced by Capa Drama with the Quebec company Incendo and Zodiak Fiction for Canal+, and No Man’s Land, a Franco-Belgian-Israeli co-production produced for Arte France and the US platform Hulu, this article aims to compare two different dimensions of the globalisation of the series market and the integration of French producers and broadcasters into this new transnational creative ecosystem. The challenge for the production of Versailles was to bring the French heritage series up to the standards of the English-speaking world while promoting French producers’ financial and artistic creativity in launching series with distinctive stories onto a global market. For No Man’s Land, however, the challenge was to produce a cosmopolitan series, featuring several cultural areas and a multilingual cast. Whether in terms of the broadcasters’ globalisation strategy or in terms of the creative or even cross-cultural challenges raised by the production process, both experiences are representative of the way series are emerging today as a laboratory of audiovisual ‘glocalisation’.