International Disruptors: Carnival Films’ Gareth Neame On ‘Downton Abbey’ Trajectory, Taking The Crawleys To The French Riviera & Why UK Drama Endures

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week, we’re talking to Carnival Films executive chairman Gareth Neame, the producer behind the global British hit franchise Downton Abbey. The company, which Neame sold to NBC Universal in 2008, continues to be one of the heavy hitters when it comes to producing high-end dramas that have global reach. 

Nothing in Gareth Neame’s career has been an accident. The veteran British producer is perhaps best known for the global phenomenon Downton Abbey, which he exec produced through his banner Carnival Films. The series, which won 15 Primetime Emmy Awards with 69 nominations (making it the most nominated non-U.S. show in Emmy history), has spawned six series and two films, the latest of which, Downton Abbey: A New Era, will begin its global rollout in the UK on April 29.

When you ask Neame whether he ever would have anticipated the trajectory this series would take, he simply replies, “yes.”

“I just always thought if we went into this genre and we did it right, it would be very, very popular,” Neame tells Deadline.

It’s this quiet assuredness coupled with a laser-focus on the job at hand that has seen Neame build Carnival Films into one of the UK’s leading TV drama companies with a slate that includes Middle Age drama The Last Kingdom, period drama Belgravia and The Gilded Age, the latter two of which reunite Neame with Downton creator Julian Fellowes.  

From a very early age, Neame knew that he wanted to work in the world of high-end television drama. He comes from a long line of show business: his grandfather Ronald Neame was a cinematographer while his father, Christopher, was a producer who worked with Peter Sellers.

“It was an easy decision to make to come into the business,” says Neame. “A lot of people follow their family footsteps and so I always knew what I wanted to do – there was never any doubt about that.”

He kick-started his career at the BBC where he started as a floor manager and worked his way up to Head of Independent Drama, a time he looks upon as “fast tracking” his career where he learned everything from development to physical production. He worked on popular Brit shows such as Spooks, Outlaws and Hustle.

Shortly after the UK’s 2003 Communications Act changed the terms of trade in the television landscape, allowing indie producers to retain ownership of their own IP, thus heralding what has been deemed a golden age of British drama, Neame was approached by Carnival Films founder and producer Brian Eastman to take over his company.

“I was looking to move into the independent sector, which was a big move a lot of us were starting to make around the time,” recalls Neame. “Making the move was more of a lifestyle choice and I could see that the independent sector was about to explode here so it was the perfect time for me to move back into producing.”

In 2004, he took over Carnival and has since grown it from strength to strength, continuing to maintain a far-reaching slate including shows such as crime drama Poirot, comedy drama Jeeves & Wooster and horror Dracula. But it was after watching Gosford Park, which earned Fellowes an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and stumbling upon old episodes of cherished costume drama Upstairs Downstairs, that the tables began to really turn. Neame couldn’t shake the idea of reinventing a 1920s period drama for episodic television in a way that was “technically clever.”

“Everything I had seen before in this genre, I didn’t really believe that I was being shown the right depiction of it,” he says. “I felt that everything I’d seen before just wasn’t accurate.”

Neame approached Fellowes about the concept of the show and had “one of those meetings that you have in your life that you don’t know is one of the most important meetings of your life while you’re having it” and the rest is television history. Downton Abbey, which aired on commercial broadcaster ITV in the UK, was acquired by more than 220 countries and territories and seen by an estimated global audience of 120 million people.

In 2008, Neame sold Carnival to NBC Universal, becoming the first scripted UK company to sell to a U.S. major, a move which many of his contemporaries have since followed. The partnership between Carnival and the studio is working well, with Neame still at the helm 14 years later.

“I think we have all the advantages of a boutique, drama label of a company that has many years standing but behind us we have the heavyweight power of a major global entertainment company, which gives us enormous distribution reach and ability to finance shows,” he says. “But it’s a collegiate and I think it works better than it’s done at any point since we joined the group.”

Neame says that NBCUni’s backing gave Downton the muscle it needed to achieve value in the international marketplace with NBCUni positioning the show as one of its top properties at markets, refusing to lower its price tag just because it was “a UK-shot series.”

“They achieved ground-breaking value for an international show when it came to Downton,” he says. “That demonstrated that not only could you create a global hit from the UK but you could achieve the same as domestic by working internationally.”

Downton is unique in the fact that it’s a show that has spawned two feature films. Its first, simply titled Downton Abbey, was released in 2019 via Focus Features domestically and Universal Pictures internationally.

“I think we were very cautious about the concept of TV to big screen because that can be a pretty stony path with more failures than successes,” admits Neame.

The title went on to take $237.9M at the global box office and became Focus Features’ highest-grossing title of all time stateside with a $96.9M domestic tally.

“Very quickly we started thinking about a sequel,” he says. “And I had always wanted to take the Crawleys to France and do a whole Tender Is The Night sort of thing. Some of my favorite episodes during the series are when they went away to the Scotland Highlands or Northumberland or up to London.”

The pandemic allowed Fellowes and the creators to work on the script of Downton Abbey: A New Era with an eye to shoot in 2021 but when the second wave of Covid-19 hit that year, the possibility of shooting in the south of France was, by Neame’s admission, looking less and less likely.

“It was a pretty stressful time, and we were looking at ways of how we could mock up the south of France in the UK, which is a pretty tall order but thankfully we managed to pull it off and make it out to France” he says, adding that crew flew on two separate planes and Covid restrictions were very tight for the 10-week shoot.

“In the end we managed to do exactly as planned and scripted and I’m absolutely thrilled with the result,” he says.

While Downton has taken much of the limelight since Neame has been at the helm of Carnival Films, the company continues to produce a steady slate of hits. It’s won BAFTAs for its miniseries The Lost Honor Of Christopher Jefferies and Any Human Heart.

Meanwhile, Saxon saga The Last Kingdom, based on the beloved adaptation of Bernard Cornwall’s best-selling The Saxon Stories novels, is heading into its fifth and final season with Netflix. It’s a long-awaited finale that was delayed due to Covid-19 and when Neame and his team told Netflix that there was one last story they would like to tell as a feature film, the streamer quickly gave them the greenlight. The two-hour feature film titled Seven Kings Must Die looks to shoot this year and will stream on Netflix.

Neame describes the relationship with Netflix as a “very trusting” one.

“It’s been great working with them,” he says of the streamer. “Netflix has been quite a different experience from what I grew up with which was very hands on participation from broadcasters who were very deeply involved.”

Throughout the years Carnival’s period dramas have faced criticism in that they lack cultural diversity, with shows like Downton being singled out. It’s an issue that is the entire entertainment industry is facing but Neame is adamant that Carnival continues to work hard to include diverse cast members in its upcoming shows.

“With shows like Downton, when it was first conceived in 2009, there was a very different sort of debate than what’s happening now,” he says. “At the time what was most relevant to us was the historical setting and Britain was a monocultural society during this time period.”

New York, he says, wasn’t and that’s why the storyline for The Gilded Age, which has just been renewed by HBO for a second season, focuses heavily on an elite class of 19th century Black New Yorkers.

“New York was such a diverse society at the time with all of the inequalities that we know about and we worked really hard on this story to have a very different take on the African American experience in New York at the time.”

The Gilded Age has been cast with a slew of Broadway stars such as Denée Benton, John Douglas Thompson and Audra McDonald who all give the most “authentic and wonderful” take to the story.

“We’ve also always been casting our contemporary shows with diverse cast members,” he says, pointing to Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, which the company did with Sky for three seasons.

Despite Carnival’s global reach, Neame says he has no plans to relocate to the U.S. like many of his British contemporaries have done. He instead prefers to work from his Covent Garden office – “I don’t particularly like working from the dining table at home” – where he has more direct access to the UK’s pool of acting talent and creatives.

“The disparity between US and UK content 20 years ago used to be absolutely enormous,” he says. “Now I think it’s really a much more level playing field, particularly when it comes to English-language content.”

He adds, “I am proud of the creative community in the UK and it’s just a great place to work. There are creatives that are getting their work seen like never before.”

 

This week’s edition of Deadline’s International Disruptors is presented by Guillotine Vodka. 

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