TV DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANT CASE STUDY
Fictional sample case study written in the voice of a fictional TV development consultant - part of Tom Bomford’s ‘Your Creative Casebook’ service.
Case Study
Northlight Pictures: How one week turned forty-one ideas into a commission
The client
Hannah Oakley runs Northlight Pictures from a converted mill office in Salford, a ten-minute walk from MediaCityUK. She set it up in 2019 after eleven years as a series producer in factual entertainment. The four-person company makes documentary and factual formats.
Hannah wasn’t focused enough on development, and she knew it. “Development is done in whatever time was left after the edit had finished with me,” Hannah says. “Some weeks that was a whole afternoon. Some weeks it was forty minutes on the tram home.”
Her slate was a spreadsheet of forty-one ideas, most marked “Sent”, and not one live conversation with a commissioner.
The problem
Hannah’s instinct was volume. Josh, her development producer, had come from a large indie that sent out twenty pitches a month. That works with a development team of eight. At a company where the managing director is also exec-producing the only series in production, ideas go out half-built, and nobody makes the follow-up calls.
Her pitch documents were well written, but aimed at nobody in particular. They described the idea without naming a slot or saying what it would follow in the schedule. That leaves the commissioner having to do the thinking, and a busy one won’t bother.
The real problem was money. Northlight gets paid for making programmes, but development brings in nothing until a channel commissions something. So when Hannah had to choose between urgent production work for a paying channel and an idea nobody had asked for yet, the production work won. That was the right call each time. Four years of right calls left her with forty-one ideas and no conversations.
So I insisted on a full week with Hannah and Josh out of production entirely.
The week
Monday: cutting the slate
We kept five ideas out of forty-one. Hannah fought for Allotment Wars, a competitive gardening format, until she heard herself call it “a bit like The Great British Sewing Bee but with marrows”. Comparisons are fine. TV runs on versions of other shows, and The Traitors was a Dutch format, De Verraders, before Studio Lambert made it a BBC hit. What sank Allotment Wars was that it copied Sewing Bee’s structure and added nothing of its own except the gardening. Silver River Productions had already tried it as The Big Allotment Challenge on BBC Two in 2014.
Tuesday: naming the buyer
For each idea we wrote down the commissioner, the slot, the programme it would follow and that commissioner’s latest public brief. Commissioners say what they want at the Edinburgh TV Festival and in interviews with Broadcast. Most producers read those. Far fewer check their own ideas against them. Hannah hadn’t, and it showed. Two of her favourites were aimed at a Channel 4 slot that had been cut the previous spring. We reworked one for Channel 5 and parked the other. Then a series about a family-run removals firm in Oldham, which had sat near the bottom of the spreadsheet for two years and only just survived Monday, matched a daytime brief almost word for word. By the evening it was top of the list.
Wednesday: the phone shoot
Hannah wanted to spend a lot of money on a polished taster. I talked her out of it. Commissioners already assume you can shoot. They want to know whether the people on screen are funny. So Josh drove to Oldham with an iPhone and a clip-on mic. The father and son running the firm argued about the best route up the M62 for four straight minutes, and it was the best thing captured.
Thursday: the one-page rule
Pitches went from six pages to one. Title, a one-line description, what happens in episode one, why now, and who’s on screen.
“I’d have spent a lot making those two look like presenters,” Hannah says. “The phone footage made them look like themselves, and that’s what sold it.” Pitches went from six pages to one. There was the title, a one-line description, a summary on what happens in episode one, why now, and who’s on screen. If it didn’t fit on a page, the idea wasn’t finished.
Friday: handing it over
The pitches went out first thing, each to one named commissioner with a short personal note.
We spent the rest of the day making sure the work would carry on after I left. Josh set a date to chase each pitch and took charge of the follow-up calls. We also tested a new weekly development meeting, to run from nine till eleven on Monday mornings. The trial overran by forty minutes, so we cut the agenda down to decisions only. Late in the day, we set aside a share of the current series' production fee as a development budget. It covers tasters and travel, and it means the edit can hire extra help when it falls behind instead of borrowing Josh. That conversation should have happened on the first morning, and with new clients it now does. We also moved the ideas list from Excel to Notion. I doubt that made much difference, but Josh likes it.
The results
Four targeted pitches led to three meetings within a month. The removals series got a paid development deal in month three and a six-part commission in month seven.
“When the commissioner rang to say yes, the first thing she mentioned was the M62 argument,” Hannah says. “I’d been sending her beautifully designed PDFs for two years and she remembered a man shouting about the Birch services.”
Rachel Doyle, the daytime commissioner who ordered it, is blunter. “Northlight’s tape was shot on a phone, and it was the only one I watched twice that month. The pitch also told me which slot it was for, which is rarer than it should be.”
We shot a phone tape at a Blackpool hotel, but the owner froze in front of it. A director who knew how to relax her would have given us a better tape. The idea still reached a funded taster, before the slot's budget went elsewhere.
Brainstorming hasn’t stopped, but it now starts from a commissioner’s brief instead of a blank whiteboard. Josh brings new ideas to the Monday session already matched to a slot, and Hannah decides which ones go further. The slate has grown from four to nine ideas that way, and Hannah can talk about any of them for ten minutes without notes.
“I thought I needed more ideas,” Hannah says. “I needed fewer, and I needed to know who I was making them for.”
David Harris is a development consultant working with independent producers across the North of England. He runs week-long development sessions for companies with small teams and big slates.