Short and sharp Titles up hours down 68 per cent for Aussie TV drama

With The Newsreader, Clickbait, RFDS, Five Bedrooms and more all on or about to be on air you might think Australian television drama was enjoying a golden age. But the picture is far more complicated: while there has been an explosion in the number of shows being made, the hours of drama produced have drastically reduced, to the point where some fear the future of the industry is at risk.

New research from QUT academic Amanda Lotz, with Anna Potter of the University of the Sunshine Coast and Professor Kevin Sanson, reveals that adult Australian drama on the commercial TV networks declined by 68 per cent from 1999 to 2019, from 208 hours a year to 67. Across all broadcasters, it was down by around one-quarter, from 254 hours to 187 (the figures exclude the long-running soaps Neighbours and Home and Away).

Keep it tight: short-run series like Five Bedrooms, starring Rodger Corser and Kat Stewart, have become the norm.Credit:Paramount+

The 2019 all-broadcaster figure (including streaming) of 187 hours was just under half the amount of drama made in the peak year of 2001, when 380 hours were produced.

“The decrease in adult drama hours commissioned by commercial broadcasters has reshaped Australian television drama more than any other change,” write the authors of the Australian Drama Index, released on Tuesday. “Commercial broadcasters’ drama decreased from an average of 21 episodes per title per year in 1999 to seven in 2019.”

That 67 per cent decrease in the number of episodes, they argue, “has diminished available training grounds and career paths in the Australian scripted production industry”.

That’s a view Matthew Deaner, chief executive of Screen Producers Australia, shares. While there has arguably been an increase in the quality of some short-run drama, he says, “we need not just quality of work â€" sometimes measured by dollars, but not always â€" but also a quantity of work to keep the industry functioning successfully”.

Bump gets a nudge: Season two of Stan’s comedy-drama is in production, with a third already commissioned. Credit:stan

Quantity helps audiences “by providing familiar characters and settings that people want to return to,” Deaner argues, as well as the industry. “It allows them to build profitable programs that can be sold well internationally, whose set-up costs can be amortised over multiple seasons, and which can provide a rich and fertile training ground for the development of our industry talent.”

Veteran producer John Edwards has seen the evolution from all angles. Back in 1999 he was overseeing development of The Secret Life of Us, a sophisticated soap about young adults in share houses in St Kilda that ran for 88 episodes over four seasons, and was part-funded by Channel 4 in the UK. Now, he’s working on the second season of Bump for Stan (owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead), with a third already commissioned.

More titles and shorter runs are not necessarily a disaster, he says, but it’s a trend that poses challenges for the industry.

“With the profusion of shorter-run titles the talent pool gets spread that much wider,” he says. “If you spread them across 30 shows instead of 15, what’s going to happen? There’s a lack of critical application as a result of the diffusion of energy and attention. But that’s the way it is, it’s not going to go back to how it was.”

Veteran TV producer John Edwards.Credit:Nine

Back in 1999, Edwards was overseeing development of The Secret Life of Us, which ran for 88 episodes and starred the likes of Deborah Mailman, Joel Edgerton and Claudia Karvan. Credit:

The findings of the Australian Drama Index are unlikely to come as shocking news to anyone working in the sector. As Graeme Mason, CEO of Screen Australia, says, “The drop in hours is part of a long-running and worldwide trend away from series”.

The report does, however, quantify the degree to which the shift to reality programming and light entertainment has disrupted drama production in the free-to-air sector.

And while many look to the streamers to take up the slack, there are no guarantees they will do so without legally binding obligations, which the government has so far been reluctant to impose.

“Everybody’s ducking and weaving and believing drama is no longer relevant on free to air,” says Edwards. “But in the UK, 11 of the top 20 programs on broadcast TV last year were scripted. In the US, 19 of the top 30 were scripted.

“This idea that drama is dead only exists in Australia, and it’s been fostered by policy,” he adds. “And until we get obligations put on streamers we’re going to have a very unstable basis for the industry.”

Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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