Laurence Herszberg has been on a 16-year journey to elevate and redefine the conversations around scripted content in Europe, turning the Series Mania Forum into one of the most significant events for executives in the business of creating, producing, and distributing dramas and comedies worldwide.
Ahead of this year’s edition, which is set to feature a wealth of high-level keynotes, pitching opportunities, showrunner masterclasses, and a celebration of Korean content, Herszberg, founder and general director of Series Mania, joins the ScreenMDM Talks podcast to weigh in on scripted trends, celebrating Korea as the event’s first-ever country of honor, cultural soft power and flexibility, and more.
The entire Series Mania Festival runs from March 20 to 27, encompassing a wealth of public screenings, while the Series Mania Forum is set to welcome more than 5,000 professionals focused on the business of creating, making, selling, and marketing scripted series worldwide.
First launched in Paris before moving to Lille, Series Mania Forum has established itself as a hub for the drama business in Q1, evolving well beyond its screening and co-production-facilitation roots to running across the entire scripted value chain. It has also expanded its geographic outlook; beginning as primarily a European event, the event will have 20-plus official delegations this year from a raft of global markets.
“The event is still growing despite the crisis in our industry,” Herszberg tells me in the latest episode of ScreenMDM Talks, which you can watch on YouTube below. We’re also available to watch on Spotify, and you can listen on Amazon Music.
“Everyone has to understand that Series Mania is a three-part event,” Herszberg explains. “As my colleagues and I were coming from the cinema, we were wondering… everyone knows everyone in the cinema world. Why is it not the case in TV? It was not the case because all the professional markets at that time were focusing on buying and selling.”
By creating a co-production forum, Series Mania shifted the focus to the beginning of the value chain. At the same time, its screenings emphasize the importance of building buzz, and its Lille Dialogues frame the conversation, exploring the regulatory issues and broader industry trends to chart a new path forward.
“We have the impression that the platforms now more and more try to invest in big shows, premium shows with big stars—always the same by the way—and that we’ll be facing some uniformity in the stories being told and the actors and actresses being shown. We have to pay attention to that. With our festival sections this year, we realized that the creativity is coming less from the U.S. and more from Europe. And what was considered running against our industry, European regulation, and especially French regulation, is now seen as an asset, enabling shows to be produced at a lower cost without sacrificing quality. Europe can do that and knows how to do it.”
It’s not just European creativity being showcased in Lille, though, with Korea selected as Series Mania’s first country of honor. “The strategy of IP coming from Korea is fascinating,” she says. “They can get from one screen to adapt to another. The other fascinating thing is how they made TV series and, more globally, their culture a major tool of soft power. Creativity can be used as [a form of] soft power. So we can learn that from the Koreans.”
While Europe learns about IP exploitation and cultural influence, Korean producers are looking to Europe to diversify their business models. “We have a very big delegation of Korean producers interested in the European model, where you have a lot of broadcasters or streamers that you can offer your show to.”
As the interview concludes, Herszberg identifies the single most important skill for the modern producer or showrunner: cultural flexibility. In a world where an Israeli show can be a hit in Brazil or a Korean drama can trend in France, creators must master the art of being hyper-local yet universally accessible. “You have to understand that your series has to be really local—you’re telling your stories—but that it could travel,” Herszberg explains. “You don’t have to lose something from your culture, but you have to learn with other people from other countries.”
