ITV Studios opened its London showcase with a slate clearly built to travel: a mix of star-led dramas, high-concept reality formats and franchise-ready crime series aimed at commissioners and global streamers. The event assembled projects from in-house labels — World Productions, Mammoth Screen, Poison Pen and Quay Street — alongside third-party partners, all packaged to appeal to buyers looking for prestige storytelling and scalable formats.
Highlights at a glance
– Scripted offerings leaned into intense, character-first storytelling: social thrillers, literary adaptations and exportable crime dramas that favour atmosphere and mood as much as plot.
– Non-scripted ideas were presented as format-first concepts: visually arresting, easy-to-pitch shows with clear mechanics and built-in hooks for social buzz and international licensing.
– Big names and established creatives were used deliberately to sharpen commercial appeal, signalling ITV’s pursuit of both quick commissions and longer-running franchise potential.
Reality: simplicity, spectacle and social traction
ITV’s unscripted strand favoured formats that are easy to explain, straightforward to localise and designed to generate chatter. Two formats dominated the conversation:
- – A purpose-built community experiment drops six households into a shared environment to compete for cash. It blends round-the-clock social observation with staged challenges, pitched as part appointment TV, part bingeable drama. Graham Norton is attached as host, offering an instantly recognisable voice for international markets.
- A glossy hybrid set in sunlit Barcelona follows young chefs who both work in and live above a restaurant. The series mixes culinary competition with relationship-driven storylines, anchored by known judges who translate personal drama into adjudicated outcomes.
Beyond those anchors, the reality slate includes survival and social-experiment concepts that trade lifestyle gloss for higher stakes and longer character arcs — the kind of shows built to deliver raw human conflict and strategic gameplay rather than aspirational polish.
Urban survival — survival drama, but in the city
One unscripted experiment flips the classic survival premise from remote wilderness to a cordoned urban neighbourhood. Sixteen participants face a 28-day trial without modern utilities, navigating resource shortfalls, logistical trade-offs and intense daily interaction. Casting will prioritise ordinary, diverse voices over trained survivalists, keeping the stakes relatable and socially topical while foregrounding community dynamics and strategy.
Scripted: from intimate moral collapse to widescreen chills
The scripted slate stretches from intimate human dramas to widescreen thrillers:
- – A social thriller set during a holiday that unravels after an impulsive act. The story charts a protagonist’s moral descent amid family fallout, black comedy and escalating peril — with set pieces on boats and wildfire-adjacent sequences steering the plot toward a survival-tinged climax.
- An adaptation of a bestselling psychological novel about a teenager accused of matricide and the forensic psychologist coping with a life-changing injury. Prophetic elements and climate-tinged subplots complicate motives and context, pushing the series into uneasy, uncanny territory.
Crime offerings clearly aim for prestige and exportability. One project is a detective drama set against the cinematic expanse of the Scottish Highlands, where ritualistic killings force an investigation across rugged terrain. Another revisits a cold-case massacre through dual timelines, blending conspiracy, horror and desert visuals. Both were pitched as franchise-ready: conceived to sustain multiple seasons and strong international sales.
Creative horsepower and casting
The slate is anchored by notable attachments — Dominic Cooper, Romola Garai, Mia Wasikowska, Alan Cumming, Abbie Cornish, Dougray Scott and Luke Evans among them — and by writers and showrunners with track records, including Russell T. Davies. That talent mix underlines ITV’s appetite for prestige casting and experienced creative teams to carry ambitious projects.
Tone, themes and intent
Across both drama and unscripted work, recurring motifs surfaced: moral ambiguity, loyalty and betrayal, multi-generational conflict and the strain ordinary people face under extraordinary pressure. Many of the projects are conceived to provoke appointment viewing and conversation rather than merely serve as background streaming.
International strategy and market positioning
The commercial brief was explicit: create IP that travels. The showcase highlighted geographically diverse projects — from series set in South Africa’s Kruger Park to event productions filmed in Australia — and emphasised finding the right platform for each title. Around 750 buyers were expected, and organizers reported early interest from international commissioners, reflecting ITV’s push to turn standout concepts into global franchises. Star attachments and seasoned creatives were deployed to boost salability, while several projects were clearly designed with multi-season franchise potential in mind.