Two years after relocating to Hollywood, BBC Studios exec Mark Linsey had a week he wouldn’t forget.
On January 5, 2025, the seasoned Brit beamed in the crowd at the Beverly Hilton Hotel as BBC Studios took home multiple gongs for hits including Baby Reindeer and Conclave at the Golden Globes. Richard Gadd mused on Reindeer‘s success as he accepted a Best Limited Series prize, saying people were “kind of crying out for something that spoke to the painful inconsistencies of being human.” Awards season was in full swing.
Two days on, and with Gadd and co heading home, Linsey’s focus had shifted spectacularly. “Elation at the beginning of the week and absolute devastation at the backend,” was his read.
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The “devastation” is a reference to the seven fires that swept through Los Angeles from January 7, killing 29, forcing 200,000 to evacuate and destroying more than 18,000 homes. What felt at the time like a nightmare is now the cause of a great deal of introspection. It has led internationally-facing execs like Linsey to take stock over where the global TV industry sits when Hollywood is struck by disaster, and as American producers descend on the English capital for the London TV Screenings, has created space to mull the wider shifts that have tormented the sector over the past couple of years.
“As soon as I landed [in L.A. in early 2023] there was the writers’ strike, then the actors’ strike,” says Linsey. “There was a slump in the market, which I describe as a crash really, and then just as you feel we’re easing out of it, you get the wildfires. It has been an extraordinary time.”
“It looked like Dresden after the war”
Linsey, a Brit, was of course not the only international exec impacted by the disaster. When harking back to that fateful week, ITV America boss David George recalls his time living in New York. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that sort of destruction,” he says. “I couldn’t go home to my apartment for a few months after 9/11 and [the wildfires] reminded me of that.”
Shark Tank EP Phil Gurin, who runs an international TV sales outfit, speaks to Deadline during a two-hour long commute that he says has more than doubled since the wildfires. The native New Yorker says he always anticipated earthquakes in L.A. but was totally unprepared for fires and the accompanying trauma, which set in immediately.
“It looked like Dresden after the war,” adds Gurin, who says he had gathered his belongings of most sentimental value in case of the need to evacuate during the fires. “I have way too many friends who lost everything. A friend and his wife who live in the Palisades went to work one morning and then had nothing but what was in their briefcases.”
Throughout these last few weeks, Gurin has been laser-focused on keeping the company lights on, but he says an event like the L.A. wildfires makes one consider the bigger picture. “You find yourself feeling silly talking about TV with people who lost their homes,” he says. “You see the small ‘mom and pop’ stores and neighbourhood shops that have been lost and think you’re lucky that a lot of people in the entertainment biz have some means to weather the storm. Although, of course, not everyone.”
Linsey, who had spent the past couple years being speedily inducted into the Angeleno way of life, says half his staff had to relocate or evacuate in the days following January 7, but he has been impressed by the “remarkable resilience” of the community, which was “fortunate to get back on its feet quickly.” At the same time, the response from the international community was “so heartwarming,” with phones pinging constantly with messages from concerned well wishers.
Sources note that industry meetings were understandably delayed in the first half of January, but much of the day-to-day work has remained remarkably BAU. One L.A. resident who works with global buyers says the competitive nature of Hollywood means that senior execs were keen to keep things ticking throughout.
Ian Russell, who runs international for the UK’s ITN Productions (ITNP) and spends much of his time in the States, says: “It felt BAU with network execs, but presumably production is going to be devastated. Our relationship [with American contacts] has quickly returned to normal. We had a lot of emails saying ‘I’ve been evacuated; I hope to get back in the next week or so’ and by now people are communicating as before.”
ITN produces the news for UK nets ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, and Russell describes a strange scenario whereby what he was watching on rolling news networks and social media was the very thing that was impacting his colleagues, contacts and friends. “It seemed somewhat surreal sitting here and watching it on our news feeds,” he adds. “Most of our key exec relationships were impacted and in one case one of them lost their house.”
ITNP resolved to do whatever it could in a way best suited to its strengths by making a doc for Channel 4 titled Inferno: LA on Fire. At just 72 hours turnaround time, ITNP exec Caroline Short says this was one of the toughest challenges she has faced. “[Channel 4 news boss] Louise Compton said we had to make it quick and we had to make it look like it hadn’t been done at speed,” explains Short.
Along with the lightning fast production time, Short’s team had to be cognisant of how the fires were affecting the execs they were working with, which added a new dimension. “We would be on a call with them and alarms are going off on their mobiles and we were like, ‘Wow, do you need to go?’. We had to be really careful about their care, but knew they felt they were doing something positive.”
Documenting these frantic few days was so much more than just “telling a story about rich celebs losing everything,” Short stresses, and she believes this is a common misconception informed by the global media’s view of L.A. “This was about saying, ‘We are all equal and look at what we are facing,’” she adds.
L.A. exodus
Looking to the near future, as execs begin heading to London for the TV Screenings, ITV’s George wonders if natural disasters like the wildfires will discourage people from moving to L.A. or cause an exodus. He flags one industry buddy who has already relocated to Austin, Texas, while others are said to be considering upping sticks to alternative production hubs like Atlanta.
George adds: “If you think about the wildfires and what will happen from a real estate standpoint, there was already this housing crisis and now it will be harder to find housing and harder to find insurance. I think a lot of people will sit back and say, ‘Do I want to be here or do I need to be here?’.”
In future, Linsey wonders whether those who may have thought about relocating will “no longer want to base their family in L.A.” owing to the potential for natural disasters, although he notes he is not feeling this at present.
Even before the fires, Deadline’s tax credit feature for the MIPCOM market pointed to a steep decline in filming in Hollywood as buyers seek cheaper alternatives in filming hubs such as Central Europe and the Middle East.
This being said, there is a concerted effort to get TV cameras rolling again in Tinseltown, aided by the nascent Stay in L.A. campaign, which has so far amassed 20,000 signatures and is backed by high-profile stars including Jonathan Nolan and Paul Feig. This is crucial to helping those lower down the chain who are in desperate need of work and for whom the fires may have had an outsized impact. “We need to ask to shoot our shows in L.A.,” Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs urged at the recent Critics Choice Awards.
Gurin reveals he and a group of local producers are having tight-lipped discussions over what they can do to get production back to L.A. in a big way, with conversations taking place over the urgent need to improve local tax credits, for example. “There has to be a way of keeping business here,” he says. “If you’ve built up an industry over 100-plus years and the whole economics of L.A. are geared around this industry and it leaves then that is terrible,” he adds. “Whether international shows begin returning to L.A. to roll cameras remains to be seen.”
Industry economics
Driven by strategic rethinks mainly from the American entertainment giants, the economics of the industry have certainly been shaken up over the past couple of years and the ripples have been felt across the world, which execs say was brought into clearer focus by the wildfires. “It’s just another thing we didn’t need,” says Gurin.
Chatter and trade reporting has been dominated so far this year by Americans’ exit from the high-end co-pro market, which is having major knock-on effects on getting shows made. One of Linsey’s initial tasks when he touched down in L.A. was to seek co-pro opportunities but he says this has shifted to a double-down on formatted IP such as CBS comedy Ghosts and NBC gameshow The Weakest Link — both BBC Studios properties. “When I agreed to come out here, it was a time when demand for British content was high and there were lots of co-pros, but that has fallen away,” he adds. “Producers are having to be more aware of the global market and more aware of the costs.”
With financing in mind, ITV America’s George says co-pros, which have become so commonplace in completing a high-end TV show’s budget, are dipping because, ironically, they add to a show’s costs. “Any fat in a budget now has to get trimmed,” he adds. “With co-pros there are multiple people you are trying to service and that drives costs up. Everyone is looking for the cleanest model.”
But Sony Pictures Television‘s Wayne Garvie, who played a part in one of the splashiest co-pro deals of this decade, the BBC-Disney+ Doctor Who regeneration, strikes an optimistic tone as he brands the current state of play a “short term blip,” — music to many ears. “Although funding and appetite is not what it was, I suspect this is a recalibration and things will pick up later this year,” adds Garvie.
Intriguingly, Garvie ponders whether another recent shift in America — the return of a certain Donald Trump to the White House — will start influencing how the American majors play in the TV market.
“How the industry comes to terms with the fact that Trump won the popular vote and how the entertainment industry responds will be quite fascinating,” he adds. “You might see a change in the kind of content that gets picked up. But again that is part of the constantly changing flux, which is one of the reasons we are in this game.”
Garvie rejects the notion that the current strife proves that the international TV industry has become overly reliant on the States and says there is money to be found from the likes of Australia and Western Europe.
The execs we speak with are bound by the hope that the industry will find its way out of the current malaise and TV execs are nothing if not problem solvers. Linsey harks back to Jan 5, when Gadd, the creative genius behind Baby Reindeer, was bringing down the house at the Globes. “What has happened with the wildfires has been reminiscent of Covid,” adds Linsey. “People work out how they are going to carry on in a creative industry with certain restrictions around them. You have to believe in the quality of your ideas.”