The Hollywood Reporter: How Gaumont Germany Is Navigating TV Drama’s Big Shake-Up
The Hollywood Reporter / Scott Roxborough, 27. March 2025
Sabine de Mardt on streamer cutbacks, reviving ‚Heidi‘ and why European drama needs to reclaim its identity: „The current moment gives us the chance to reinvent ourselves as Europeans, and come closer together on European issues.“
Getting an international TV show made these days is a tough business.
Rising production costs are meeting falling budgets and even the deep-pocketed streamers — who had turbo-charged the global business with big-budget commissions for the past several years — are shifting gears, making fewer shows and focusing more on lower-cost crime shows and less on big-budget drama.
Gaumont German president Sabine de Mardt
Her upcoming slate includes the crime thriller Bone Palace for Netflix, the fantasy-flavored Parallel Me (exec produced by Rainer Marquass) for Paramount+ and a reboot of the classic children’s franchise Heidi, being produced together with Swiss group DCM Schweiz for Swiss broadcaster SRF and German streamer RTL+, with Rainer Marquass exec producing for Gaumont.
De Mardt sat down with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of this year’s Series Mania TV festival to talk about the changing strategies of global streamers, the growing role of European co-productions and how the Trump government is impacting the business.
Gaumont is known for its high-end drama series, but that market has been shaken up in the past few years as the streamers have changed their strategies.
When the streamers first arrived, there was the big hope in Germany that we could finally tell darker, more complex stories — all the things that we weren’t allowed to tell before. And that was true for a while, but it’s striking how the streamers have developed. They initially focused very much on the younger target group, but that’s changed. They own the younger demo anyway so they are focusing more on older audiences and on genres like crime and thriller, which has been successful with that audience. Crime is so effective because it has that narrative engine that pulls you in. Even in a brilliant show like The White Lotus, you have the body at the beginning, that helps to drive the story engine.
… read the full ariticle here:
Sabine de Mardt on streamer cutbacks, reviving ‚Heidi,‘ and why European drama needs to reclaim its identity.
