Dawn Porter on How She’s Pivoted During the TV Downturn to Keep Telling Stories That Matter

Scott Roxborough
·4 min read

“I bring you news from America, where commissions are plentiful and they all come within two weeks,” joked Dawn Porter, playing to the industry crowd at the international television market MIPTV on Sunday.

It got a big laugh. Everyone in the audience knows the reality: That the era of peak TV is past and that broadcasters and streamers are slashing their budgets for original programming. That decline is one of the reasons this will be the last MIPTV, with plans to move MIP to London next year and dramatically downsize the storied TV market. The mood on the Croisette this year is practically funereal.

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But Porter came to MIP not to bury the TV business but to praise it.

“I’m sure that we’re all quite aware of the difficulties of commissioning and the challenges in our market,” she told the industry audience, “but I want to stress that there’s still quite a good path for quality filmmaking, and I’m really privileged to be a part of it.”

Despite the broader decline in TV commissioning and financing, Porter, and her Trilogy Films outfit have had a stupendous year. Her documentary The Lady Bird Diaries, an archival footage doc about former first lady Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson, premiered at SXSW and was a hit for backers and distributors ABC News and Hula; her four-part Showtime original docu-series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, picked up both independent spirit and critics choice award nominations; and Luther: Never Too Much, her look at the late great R&B legend Luther Vandross, was a Sundance standout.

But the non-fiction sector is still reeling from the pull-back by global streamers, who for years had plowed money into documentaries, spending millions to acquire indie docs out of festivals. Now that that funding has largely dried up — Luther: Never Too Much is still searching for a distributor — Porter said producers are being forced to be more creative in both their financing and storytelling. Both Lady Bird and Luther rely heavily on archive libraries — there’s not a single new interview in Lady Bird — using old material to provide a new perspective on their subjects and their history. In another shift, both Lady Bird and Deadlocked were developed in close collaboration, and with development funding, from their respective commissioning broadcasters. “I’m finding what commissioners are doing now is giving us a little bit more of development money in order to bring these stories to life,” said Porter.

For her upcoming documentary project, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, a look at the personal life on South African leader Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie, Porter tapped private funding to develop the doc before going out wide to broadcasters. “The first money in there is substantially from a private foundation,” she said, “which allows us to shape the story and to really dig into how it is going to be differentiated [from other documentaries about Mandela].”

Current market conditions are challenging, Porter admitted, but the appeal of non-fiction series and films, she argued, is undeniable.

“The good news, the very good news, [is that] nonfiction is really resonating with the audiences and that’s been recognized by so many broadcasters,” Porter said.

This doesn’t just mean more reality TV and celebrity docs. Porter’s Lady Bird and Deadlocked — the latter is a four-part deep dive into the history of the right-wing shift at the U.S. Supreme Court, from the Nixon era to today — show there is a demand for provocative, complex and in-depth nonfiction.

“Nonfiction long form does really, really well,” Porter said, noting that work like hers can be an antidote to the scourge of social media-driven fake news. “I think we need both. We need TikTok, Snapchat and wherever my kids get their news, things that may make them a little interested [in a subject]. But we also need the longer explanations. I’m finding people are actually relieved [watching my documentaries] that they can really sink into something and not have to digest it in just a few minutes.”

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