If you read the trade press, or follow Mediaguardian, you can’t help to have noticed all the reports about how Footballers’ Wives, the trashy ITV series, is being remade in US by ABC.
On the surface, this seems like another successful deal for a British indie. But this is Shed Productions, who’ve seen Footballers’ Wives finish its run in the UK now, with the threatened end of their other banker Bad Girls. They need a good result at the moment.
What’s actually happened is that a script has been commissioned in the usual pilots process that begins at this time of the year. If you listened to Paul Jackson’s series LA Stories earlier this year on Radio 4, you’ll recall that each network buys roughly 60 scripts a year of which 8 will make it to the pilot stage, and 3 will be commissioned. So at the moment, that gives Footballers Wives a 5% chance of appearing. We can be generous and double that because series with track records abroad have a greater chance of appearing. But that’s still only a 1 in 10 shot. Not quite the story it once was.