Channel 4 content boss Ian Katz has joined the Adolescence debate sparked this morning at the Edinburgh TV Festival and called out Netflix for not hosting a Spotlight Session at the fest.
While noting “we love Netflix” as a platform, Katz swung in behind his news chief Louisa Compton, who earlier today said that Netflix behaved like “TV tourists” over Adolescence after Channel 4 had spend decades giving opportunities to Adolescence co-creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham.
“What Louise was getting at is there is a bit of a problem when global streamers are happy to take advantage of an incredibly rich global ecosystem that has been built up through years and years of PSBs investing in talent, in small companies, spread around the country,” he added.
Deadline revealed last week that Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Warner Bros. Discovery wouldn’t be taking part in their usual Spotlight Sessions at Edinburgh TV Fest and Katz called this out. “They don’t have any obligation to do any of those things. They’re not even having Spotlight Sessions,” he said.
Elsewhere, Katz delivered an emotive viewpoint on why broadcasters and broader institutions need to get their coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict spot on or risk losing young audiences in their entirety.
He added: “The thing that really strikes me as an industry, and perhaps more widely as a set of institutions, is that we are at risk of missing the fact that for a lot of younger people in this country the Gaza-Israel conflict has become the defining issue for their generation.
“If we don’t get Gaza-Israel right we will lose young audiences and could lose them for a generation.”
Katz, who at last night’s annual press dinner praised Channel 4’s risk-taking over taking on the BBC’s Gaza: Doctors Under Attack documentary, said his network has handled the conflict “very sure-footedly and with subtlety, intelligence and commitment.”
He said there had previously “been a slightly lazy caricature” that younger audiences only want to watch shows like Married at First Sight and Love Island, or tune into YouTubers like Mr Beast and the Sidemen.
Channel 4 has been massively ramping up drama of late, having unveiled shows from the likes of Steven Moffat, Ronan Bennett and starring Glenn Close at this year’s fest so far.
Katz said his team is looking at drama costing around £2.5M to £2.7M, which is not prohibitively expensive, and that the network is “not sitting back and waiting for American co-producers.”
He said the network’s two most-watched dramas of the year, Patience and In Flight, are “at the bottom end scale of our tariffs.”
