Dreaming Whilst Black brought a new, diverse audience to the BBC in droves, according to the buzzy comedy’s EP Dhanny Joshi, who was speaking on a panel of diverse creatives at MIA Market.
According to Big Deal Films co-founder Joshi, the A24-distributed comedy has now notched up one of the highest shares of Black viewers for a BBC comedy of all time, around one quarter.
Joshi in part put this down to “creative choices” made throughout the making of the series, which took more than five years to get from web series to screen.
“We were offered deficit financing from huge distributors [early on] but said ‘Let’s not do that,” he told a panel in Rome. “Our overdraft facility may have been just £3,000 ($3,670) but we didn’t want to be tied to a distributor who may view creative choices as risky. So we were protecting ourselves and went on to get a huge Black audience.”
Execs from the public broadcaster have told Joshi’s team they “brought an audience that otherwise wouldn’t have come to the BBC,” he added.
Dreaming Whilst Black launched in August and has garnered highly favorable reviews, while being picked up by Showtime in the U.S. It follows Kwabena, played by Salmon, an aspiring filmmaker stuck in a dead-end recruitment job who takes the first step to achieving his dream of creating a TV show.
Joshi reflected on how the UK TV broadcasting ecosystem has improved its diverse make-up since the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, including hiring more commissioners from under-represented backgrounds.
“In the early days of Big Deal I asked to pitch a show and got told [by commissioners], ‘We’re not taking pitches for another eight months’,” he said. “Then more diverse people came in and suddenly we had four shows within a few months. These people have decision-making power, get the perspective and are open minded enough to identify talent that they otherwise wouldn’t have got on screen.”
More queer voices
Speaking alongside Joshi, Bilal Baig, the creator of Peabody-winning CBC/HBO Max series Sort Of, urged more queer voices in senior roles behind the camera.
Sort Of
Max
“Being an EP affects quality of product,” they said. “I want us in more positions where we can say things like, ‘Hey I’m not noticing enough of this community on the show what can we do about it?’. I often find I’m the only diverse one in the room who brings up these conversations.”
Sort Of, which will soon end after three seasons, stars Baig as Sabi Mehboob, a non-binary millennial trying to balance their roles as a child of Pakistani immigrant parents, a bartender at an LGBTQ+ bookstore and café, and a caregiver to the young children of a professional couple. As with Dreaming, it has attracted critical acclaim for portrayal of stories rarely seen on screen.
Baig forged a training program on Sort Of for trans and non-binary people, which included training for department heads to understand “how to make time for these people.”
“People were messaging me afterwards saying they’ve got jobs on different sets now so it’s been a really effective vehicle,” added Baig.
While acknowledging that “trans and non-binary characters can have short lives,” Baig stressed that ending the show after three seasons was an “organic decision.”
Nicola De Angelis, CEO and Head of Development at Netflix’s Baby producer Fabula Pictures, said Italy has some way to go on diversity when compared with the British and Canadian industries. He said the Italian music industry is “more evolved [than TV] in terms of embracing new talent, new types of music.”
“We are in a different status of evolution here so not quite evolving yet but people can be open-minded,” he added. “Commissioners are open-minded here and the more freedom they give us, the more opportunities we will get.”
De Angelis railed against tokenism, adding: “We don’t want commissioners to use trans actors like pins on the jacket. It’s disrespectful and not inclusive. We need to create organic stories where everyone can find themselves.”
MIA Market is running all week in Rome, with the likes of Paramount’s Nicole Clemens, Nicolas Weinstock and Marge Dean addressing the confab.
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