With credits that include the international hit Sherlock & Daughter, Brendan Foley has proven adept at creating original IP and bringing diverse partners together to get shows off the ground. He joins ScreenMDM Talks to share his expertise on the delicate art of high-end drama co-productions.
The Northern Irish creator and EP has experience working in more than 70 markets, giving him a unique perspective on the ins and outs of landing broadcast, streaming, and distribution partners. A former journalist, Foley’s recent credits include Sherlock & Daughter, the family- and YA-friendly period drama starring David Thewlis, Dougray Scott, and Blu Hunt that topped the rankings on The CW, rose to the top five on HBO Max in the U.S., and performed well in Scandinavia and Australia, among other markets.
Amid the all-round contraction in the scripted business post-peak TV, Foley acknowledges that it is harder to get something into production, but a newfound shift towards partnerships has been good for the business overall, and for creators like him proficient at pulling the pieces together. “I’m three times busier than I was even five years ago,” Foley says on ScreenMDM Talks, which you can watch on Spotify and YouTube and listen to on Apple Podcasts.
“There is a tendency to overcomplicate the really fundamental nature of co-production,” he says. “Essentially, co-pros have always, economically at least, been about two things: bigger budgets in order to make something special and a bigger audience in order to add value to what you’ve created and for more people to see it.”
Foley spoke to ScreenMDM about the logistics of successful co-productions, the toolkit creators and EPs need to arm themselves with, appealing to broad audiences, tracking zeitgeist trends in this long-lead-time genre, and the impact of AI on the business at large.
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