Doc Martin

Acorn TV/RLIE

Agatha Raisin

Acorn TV/RLIE

Detectorists

Acorn TV/RLIE

A Place to Call Home

Acorn TV/RLIE

Striking Out

Acorn TV/RLIE
Fill 1
Fill 1
December 20, 2016
Features

Keep Calm and Stream On!

The cure for the post-Downton doldrums could be Acorn TV, the streaming service that, for more than two decades, has been sating Yankee appetites for the best in British dramas, mysteries and more.

Jeff Weinstock

Since the chandeliers were dimmed and the bouillon spoons laid to rest on Downton Abbey, American fans of British television have been wondering where to turn next.

Well, not quite all of them. Informed Anglophiles were likely already acquainted with Acorn TV, a subscription-based streaming service dedicated to bringing British TV shows to North American viewers. And for those who embraced British television for the first time as Lady Mary surrendered to Matthew Crawley, Acorn is hoping to bring them into the fold.

“I know many people for whom Downton may have been the first British show they ever watched,” says Mark Stevens, president of Acorn Brands, a subsidiary of RLJ Entertainment. “It’s always funny when you hear that. It’s like, ‘ Really? You’ve never seen anything else?’ Downton may have done a lot to open people’s eyes to the amount of interesting content that’s available.”

The curious ones have since discovered Acorn TV, whose inventory of shows goes more than 250 deep, trending decidedly toward cerebral dramas and mysteries. A sweep of the search field produces classics like Brideshead Revisited, Prime Suspect and the original Poldark, as well as an abundance of Agatha Christie adaptations, including every season of ITV’s Poirot and Marple (RLJ Entertainment owns a majority stake in the novelist’s literary estate).

Among the more contemporary titles are Foyle’s War, Vera and Midsomer Murders.

Particularly binge-inducing is Doc Martin, something of a British take on Northern Exposure. Yanks can enjoy some consummate British phrasing when the good doctor advises a tongue-tied plumber to “treat yourself to a noun.”

Even the most voracious British TV watcher may be surprised to unearth old crime shows like The Irish RM, Blue Murder and The Last Detective. And anyone grazing for name actors in long-ago roles will land on Judi Dench in the 1981 comedy A Fine Romance, or, better yet, Ian McShane in Lovejoy, playing an antiques dealer with a fierce mullet that’s part bed head, part Hasselhoff.

“You’ll get the Downtons on the likes of Masterpiece,” says Shane Murphy, managing director of Acorn’s development division, Acorn Media Enterprises. “We are bringing a far broader offering to a North American audience than that.”

From its home in Silver Spring, Maryland, Acorn wears its designation as a niche streamer not just earnestly, but serenely. “We look at ourselves as a complement to other services,” Stevens says. “We fully expect our audience is watching other things on TV and may be subscribing to Netflix or Amazon.”

Stevens’s assuredness is well founded. The company has been settled in this space for more than two decades, since seeing an opening in the market — underfed North American fans of British telly — and launching the effort to fill it through home video.

Over time, only the manner of delivery changed, as VHS led to DVD and Blu-ray, then to cable, DTO (download to own; e.g., iTunes) and in 2011, streaming video on demand. The content, however, did not stray.

“That was, to some extent, part of our success because we became very knowledgeable about our customers,” Stevens says. Years of DVD sales and Acorn TV viewing data have framed the audience’s sweet spot.

“There’s a certain sensibility that we find our audience gravitates toward,” he continues. “At the core are high-quality, well-packaged, well-acted dramas. There just was not a lot of availability here in North America. PBS was the most obvious home, but they only have so many slots for this type of content. They’re not a British channel, they’re a public broadcaster.

“Now — because of the move into the digital space and the opportunity to deliver [content] directly into people’s homes — people are starting to discover it.”

Subscriber numbers corroborate that. From October 2015 to October 2016, Acorn subscriptions more than doubled, jumping from 177,000 to 370,000. Acorn doesn’t have a monopoly on British programming, but it isn’t necessarily after one. It just wants first dibs. Doc Martin, Poirot, Foyle’s War and others can be found elsewhere, but their most recent seasons were introduced in the U.S. exclusively on Acorn TV.

“Our goal is, if you’re a consumer who loves this kind of content and you want to see it first, we’re the place you go to,” says Chad Campbell, the company’s senior publicity director.

That claim requires Acorn to compete for rights over the release of British shows in the U.S., pitting the company against outlets ranging from PBS and Lifetime to SundanceTV, A&E and the leviathans of the streaming market, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

That effort led to Murphy’s hiring in 2015 to run Acorn Media Enterprises, escalating Acorn’s involvement in the production of shows from their outset.

A producer credit, Stevens says, is the surest way to clinch distribution rights in the U.S. and secure new programming for Acorn’s customers. “We can’t wait till content is developed to discover that it’s not available to us, because there’s a group that’s going to put it somewhere else.”

Since Murphy came aboard, Acorn has entered into production partnerships on a half-dozen shows the company has branded as Acorn TV Originals. The first, Agatha Raisin, about a London PR agent who adopts a new life as a small-town crime buster, premiered last June on Britain’s Sky 1 network and debuted on Acorn TV in August.

More are coming through 2017, including another Agatha Christie production, The Witness for the Prosecution, in January. Murphy believes Acorn makes an appealing partner because it can satisfy producers’ principal objective: to reach as large an audience as possible.

He spells out a distribution strategy in which the company moves a show across every working platform once it finishes its run on Acorn TV, selling it to a cable channel or syndicating it to local PBS stations, then making another sale to a larger streaming service. Each advance to a new platform starts a fresh buzz over the show, prompting renewed interest in the DVD.

“We take a much more comprehensive approach to the market than most people do,” Murphy says. “It just gives you a couple of extra bites at the cherry.”

“It’s kind of flipping the model,” Stevens says. “You’re going out to the core audience first, and expanding to the broader audience second. That’s our pitch to a lot of producers in the creative community: ‘We will take care of this show; this is our bread and butter.’”

It won over Michelle Buck, CEO of U.K.–based Company Pictures, who partnered with Acorn on Agatha Raisin.

“They know what works for their subscribers, they understand their market, and if I’ve got a show that fits the parameters of that, then it’s just easy,” she says, adding that the collaboration was a natural because the pace and narrative of Agatha Raisin are unequivocally Acorn.

“They love good British stuff. They love detective shows. Agatha is quintessentially English. It’s shot in the most beautiful Gloucestershire countryside, in the most quintessentially English villages. The public understands there’s going to be a dead body and you’re going to go on a journey to find out who the killer was.

"But it’s also totally charming. Of course, it’s got moments of adrenaline and tension, but it’s not going to be graphic or nasty or horrible.” That’s the long version of Murphy’s summary description of Acorn TV’s core content: murder with teacups in the background.

Buck also partnered with Acorn on the final episode of the long-running Poirot, which earned a 2015 Emmy nomination for outstanding television movie. The first Emmy nod for a niche streamer, it validated Acorn’s emergence as a program developer, rather than merely a provider.

“It got people’s attention because it was this channel, Acorn TV, that a lot of people had probably never heard of,” Stevens says. “It was great for us.”

Poirot’s Emmy nomination provided Acorn with a precious breakthrough moment, coming as it did in the era now characterized as “peak tv,” when viewers are so inundated with quality television shows, nobody can possibly get to them all.

As NPR television critic Eric Deggans explains, an oversupply is never good for business. “The fear is that you reach a point where there’s so much original programming that many of the outlets that create it can’t make money and they wind up failing,” he says.

Acorn has a cushion, however, as its monthly $4.99 subscriber fees are supported by revenue from sale of DVDs and the host of merchandise on its website.

Plus, Deggans suggests that peak TV may be an environment more suited for a niche provider: Acorn TV’s success doesn’t depend on the release of a particular show, but on its ongoing association with a kind of show.

“They’re able to serve that market in a way that none of their other competitors can because they’re doing so many things at once,” Deggans says, “A lot of their audience is going to be people who know the service, know what they have and know they want it.”

Stevens builds on that thought: “The other networks are chasing the size of the audience. In our minds, we’re chasing the satisfaction of the audience.” Acorn appears to have caught up to both. In addition to doubling its subscribers, Acorn TV was ranked best for value in a Consumer Reports survey on streaming services earlier this year, outpointing Netflix, Apple iTunes, HBO Now, Amazon and Hulu.

The successes lend Acorn more reason to continue to play to its base. The company has extended the borders of its programming, but not the nucleus.

Shows from outside Britain are gaining a presence, but only those that have the same consistency as Acorn TV’s other content, such as the popular Australian period saga A Place to Call Home. The Brokenwood Mysteries from New Zealand could be mistaken for Midsomer Murders by merely swapping out the accents. Two upcoming Acorn TV coproductions hail from Ireland: Striking Out and Acceptable Risk.

Acorn has even started exploring the frostiest region of international programming: comedy. Having spent more than a decade in comedy development, Murphy says it’s not simply a U.S.–U.K. disagreement over what’s funny. “Believe me, it’s not just America that’s difficult to carry comedy into,” he says. “It’s a global problem.”

Yet Detectorists, a British comedy about two ordinary men and their daily treasure hunt, has been a hit for Acorn. Having a lead actor familiar to American viewers, Mackenzie Crook, doesn’t hurt, Murphy points out. But the show also carries the right tone.

“It’s a whimsical, gentle comedy. That’s different than trying out a gag-every-six-seconds sitcom based in a small British town that the audience in North America can’t really identify with.”

Murphy frequently uses a marketing term, USP, or unique selling point — that which distinguishes one entity from its competitors — to argue for the importance of staying on brand as he scouts for new programming for Acorn TV. “We weaken that USP at our peril,” he says.

He cites a show Acorn passed on, a medical drama with a largely British cast. The deal-breaker? The locale. “It would’ve been brilliant for us, but it was set in New York. It was a New York story. A show like that would be available to an American audience from other sources. The identity of our content is that we’re bringing in stuff you just don’t find elsewhere in North America.

"You can experiment, but if you lose focus on what your core brand means to an audience, you get lost in a very noisy market.”

That’s not to mean Acorn is confined by its niche. The task is discovering just how roomy that space is.

“There is still a very large untapped audience for this content because it just doesn’t get the visibility,” Stevens says. “It’s really about making that breakthrough and letting people sample it.”

Even as new platforms arise as successors to streaming, Stevens believes Acorn will continue to function as gatekeeper.

“Our audience trusts our brand to sort through the content and tell them the shows they should be considering, because we know the kinds of things they like to watch. “We are curators. We’re curating. We’re selecting a range of content that will satisfy our core audience. It’s really about the caliber of the content. I think we’ll always be about that.”


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 10, 2016

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