Walter Presents: A Chic TV Boutique With a Foreign Accent
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Version 0 of 1. Walter Iuzzolino was sitting in the cafe at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan earlier this month, waxing lyrical about “Spiral,” a popular police show in France. When Mr. Iuzzolino gets on the subject of television drama, his hands gesture wildly and the superlatives fly. “It’s big, bold, gripping, crime,” Mr. Iuzzolino said. “The characters are dark and sexy and chic and violent.” He caught his breath. “And you love it!” When he finished talking, you wanted not so much to watch the show as to smoke a cigarette. Mr. Iuzzolino is passionate about television. For years, he worked as a program commissioner for Britain’s Channel 4. He produced “The Undatables,” a documentary series about people with disabilities trying to find love, and commissioned “Country House Rescue,” about the fading aristocracy in crumbling estates. But Mr. Iuzzolino, 48, who is Italian, had long nursed another dream — to diversify all the Anglo-American programming with foreign drama. Emboldened by “Spiral,” which became a hit in England, despite being subtitled, he quit his high-profile job three years ago to binge-watch prestige TV from Germany, Brazil and beyond. He’d search out immensely popular, award-winning foreign shows and track down their creators and producers. The result of 4,000 hours of TV consumption is Walter Presents, an online streaming service that began in Britain in January 2016. And now, when Americans have access to more TV from around the world, Mr. Iuzzolino is bringing Walter Presents to the United States. The service will debut in March with a catalog of 34 shows, or about 300 hours of TV, and at least two new shows will be added each month, he said. Unlike the ad-financed free version in Britain, the cost for the ad-free service here will be $6.99 per month. “It was a cultural crime that all these beautiful pieces made around the world didn’t have a home,” Mr. Iuzzolino said. “I thought: I want to become that home. I want our brand to be that.” [See where to stream more great foreign-language shows at Watching, a TV and movie recommendation site from The New York Times.] Mr. Iuzzolino described the shows he selects as ones that “bombard your senses,” before elaborating, with his signature hype-dripping staccato: “You’re actually opening up your world to an entire universe of style, fashion, the most beautiful actors and actresses in the world, great writing, great photography.” “Spin,” one of Mr. Iuzzolino’s favorites, is a French political drama along the lines of “House of Cards,” with grander architecture and sexier bureaucratic hacks. Another show, “Black Widow,” a Dutch crime series, is like “The Sopranos,” if Tony got whacked in Episode 1 and Carmela took over the mob rackets. Mr. Iuzzolino’s latest discovery, “Valkyrien,” is a moody Norwegian thriller about a doctor who runs an illegal hospital in an unused underground metro station. In the video introduction that he records for most of his selections, Mr. Iuzzolino, with his black-frame glasses and manicured stubble, says breathlessly that “Valkyrien” is “a high-concept thriller which will have you gripped from the start.” Then he fixes the viewer with a you-better-watch stare. The busy person already overwhelmed by the abundance of gripping TV may be muttering, more? Nor is there a lack of viewing options for overseas shows. Where once the armchair tourist had to make due with episodes of “Agatha Christie’s Poirot” and old reruns of “Doctor Who” on PBS, the streaming age has opened up more countries’ borders than the Schengen Agreement. Netflix offers “Spiral” and other top global series, while Amazon Prime has its own banquet of foreign shows. The online subscription service Acorn specializes in fare from English-language countries like Britain, Australia and New Zealand. More British TV will be available next month with the arrival of BritBox, an ad-free streaming service from partners BBC Worldwide and ITV. The on-demand video service promises the largest library of British programming ever assembled, a mix of current shows like “Cold Feet” and “Silent Witness” and classics like “Upstairs Downstairs” and “Are You Being Served?” “British programming is more than the few shows people have been exposed to through PBS,” said Soumya Sriraman, president of BritBox, adding that the sheer breadth of programming would make “consumers feel they are in a British environment.” What many streaming services lack, however, is a Walter. He likened himself to a man running a tasteful boutique in a world of supermarkets. “It’s the curation of the real individual versus the curation of the algorithm,” Mr. Iuzzolino said. Jay Hunt, chief creative officer for Channel 4, which was an early investor and partner in Walter Presents, describes the offerings as “a bizarre and eclectic collection of shows” that “all have Walter’s stamp.” She added: “It’s like someone recommending a book to you, a book they love, a book that has shaped them.” Mr. Iuzzolino didn’t plan to appear on camera, or name the service after himself. It was Ms. Hunt’s idea to make him a brand. “You get the sense that he loves it, he absolutely loves it,” she said. Mr. Iuzzolino described himself as a “truffle hunter” searching out fantastic stuff among the rubbish, and he said he never acquires a show because he thinks it will be a hit or appeal to a target audience. “It sounds selfish, but I buy for me,” he said. “This is a little shop, and I have to live in it. It’s crucial that what’s chosen is what I feel I can defend and love.” When he finds a show like “Spin” or “Valkyrien,” it makes him want to share it with a loved one, he said. Mr. Iuzzolino had the same emotions as a boy watching dubbed Latin American soaps with his Neapolitan grandmother, who would weep at the melodrama as she and her grandson ate a treat she called wet sweet bread. “I remember sitting on the sofa with my grandmother,” he recalled, “eating this schlocky stuff, and thinking, this is heaven.” |