Developing high-end television drama through transnational coproduction: a study of Medici: Masters of Florence, My Brilliant Friend, and The Name of the Rose
Publication Date
July 27, 2026
Creator
Giulia Manica
Abstract
Michele Hilmes (2014) poses a deceptively simple yet pressing question about the evolving landscape of transnational television: ‘What do we mean by “coproduction” anymore?’ Once defined by financial collaboration or distribution presale, transnational coproduction today increasingly involves complex creative partnerships, where national interests, audience expectations, and institutional logics must be negotiated and balanced. These are no longer merely business arrangements, but sites of tension and compromise, between public service principles and commercial imperatives, cultural specificity and global appeal, creative autonomy and market pragmatism. Public discourse often simplifies these dynamics, obscuring how coproductions are actually made and what their development processes reveal about creative and industrial practice. Hilmes’s provocation prompts deeper inquiry into how transnational dramas are shaped, how these systems variously operate, and which factors – embedded within these dynamics – influence or determine the resulting media outputs, and why they matter.
While Italian television drama has a long-standing tradition – beginning in the 1950s-60s with theatre-inspired sceneggiati and evolving through a diverse range of miniseries spanning adventure, crime, and religious themes in the following decades – it was not until the advent of pay-TV Sky in the 2000s that the paradigm of high-end drama began to take shape. Against this backdrop, the 2010s marked a strategic turning point for RAI, which embraced transnational coproductions as a means to re-engage segments of the domestic audience and, crucially, achieve prominent positioning within the global television market.
This thesis responds by examining three RAI-driven dramas – Medici: Masters of Florence (2016), My Brilliant Friend (2018), and The Name of the Rose (2019) – to explore how transnational coproduction has been redefined within the Italian production system. No longer a backstage funding model, it has emerged as a visible and contested space of creative negotiation, cultural legitimacy, professional identity, and institutional transformation. Focusing on development, the study excavates the deeper layers of institutional logic and creative agency – individual and collective – within two key phases: early development, including rights acquisition, deal-making, financing, and project structuring; and screenwriting, which involves concept creation, treatment, a series bible, and the negotiation of narrative scope and creative control, particularly in relation to transnational ambitions. Based on extensive direct interviews and additional sources, the study highlights transnational coproduction as a culturally situated form whose affordances reshape roles, practices, and industry conventions. It contributes to media industries research by foregrounding cultural diversity not only in media representation, but in production practices, emphasising how diversity is enacted behind the scenes, while also challenging pre-established Anglo-American paradigms as prevailing evaluative frameworks.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
PhD
Supervisors
Subjects (LC)
Associated Schools / Departments
UoN Repository URI
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