Maria Pia Ammirati, head of drama at Italian pubcaste Rai, describes to Prensario the good moment of the Rai Fiction division, consolidating its existing partnerships and adding new ones to have the best international coproductions in the pipeline.
‘Rai Fiction confirms and consolidates a strategy that, in terms of quantity and quality, places it at the top of the Italian market as a multi-platform content provider, capable of competing at the highest level in international markets’, initiated Maria Pia Ammirati, head of Drama.
In the 2020/2021 season, the product offers totaled 418 hours (78% of the national total) compared to 342 in the previous season. In 2021, 152 evenings of drama were broadcast on the three main channels, including premieres (118) and re-runs (34). The top 20 most-watched TV fiction shows in 2021 only include RAI programs. At the top of the list is one of the best known and most loved Italian characters in the world, Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano, whose final episode (The Catalanotti Method) reached an average audience of 9.5 million viewers and a 39.5% share.
On the digital front, in 2021, fiction was also confirmed to be one of the most viewed genres on Rai Play, with 42.6% of total Legitimate Streams on the platform (+0.5% vs 2020) and 47.1% TTS-Total Time Spent (+0.4% vs 2020). ‘This positive trend is confirmed by the excellent audience results from Spring 2022, which have led us to strengthen our commitment to our audience and raise the quality of our offer even further, producing stories that reflect the complexity of contemporary life across all genres’, added Ammirati.
Rai Fiction operates within the framework of a public service, which is renewing and relaunching its mission beyond broadcast TV, within a multi-platform horizon. ‘It is not a question of working in separate fields, but of enhancing the value of an integrated whole. Starting with the Rai Play platform to tap into new audiences or younger audiences that do not watch traditional TV. The search for this target audience remains a priority for us. It is an exciting challenge and gives us extra motivation to look to the future with confidence and take the lead with the strength of our stories’, she commented.
About the international field, she indicated: ‘We have made a name for ourselves internationally thanks to the wealth and quality of our content, language and talent. Italianness is not just about the quality of work, but also about added value, like beauty, history, territory, art and the charm of a way of life.We continue along the prestigious path we have already taken, following the examples of major international co-productions, including Medici family, the Name of the Rose from Umberto Eco’s best-seller, or HBO’s My Brilliant Friend from Elena Ferrante’s four-part series filmed in the Neapolitan dialect’.
Other titles being developed are The Count of Montecristo, inspired by the great literary classic, and to give an example in the true crime genre, Blood on the Altar, which follows an Italian crime story with international implications. ‘The international scene is not a side-line, it is a structural benchmark from which we can relaunch the competitive strength of a tradition in which Rai has always played a leading role. It is unthinkable to confine ourselves to a national perimeter without challenging ourselves’, underlined Ammirati.
And she completed: ‘However, the ambitious scale of some projects can only be tackled with international co-productions. We are in a new phase, where enormous growth in the audio-visual industry is opening up opportunities and scope for collaboration that were unthinkable a few years ago. It is the ideas that win’.
Regarding its the European Alliance with France Télévisions (France) and ZDF (Germany), she explained: ‘It is a partnership where the contribution of every single member is fundamental, within a framework of open and continuous discussion regarding the various projects under evaluation, and the general issues concerning the production and distribution market for serial content. Among the various titles, we have the mystery drama Survivors created by a team of young writers who attended Rai‘s Scriptwriting Masters program in Perugia, directed by Carmine Elia, and has an international cast. There is also the period drama Germinal, a series created by Julien Lilti, adapted from the novel with the same name by Émile Zola, directed by David Hourrégue, based on important themes that reflect our contemporary world’.
Looking further ahead its the thriller The Reunion, from the bestseller La Jeune Fille et la Nuit by Guillame Musso, directed by Bill Eagles. Then, The Swarm, one of the most important European co-productions ever, directed by Luke Watson, Barbara Eder and Philipp Stoelzl, based on the science fiction bestseller with the same title by Frank Schätzing and mainly filmed in Italy.
