Netflix's House of Cards 'should be making TV industry shit it'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/08/netflix-house-of-cards-tv-industry

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Veteran drama producer and director Peter Kosminsky believes that traditional UK broadcasters ought to be "shitting it" about the arrival of online provider Netflix, which he says represents the "end of an era" for the traditional model of broadcasting content.

The Bafta-award winner revealed at a TV industry event earlier this week that he watched the Netflix launch of the Kevin Spacey political drama House of Cards last Friday and realised that the age of linear TV was doomed.

"I stayed up and watched three episodes in a row and I realised that I was watching the end of an era," he said of the House of Cards online launch, which bypassed traditional TV networks by premiering the whole 13-part series at once.

"This was something that was nothing to do with traditional broadcasting," he added, comparing the service to being delivered an instant box set. "If I was a traditional broadcaster watching that I would have been shitting it if I saw that show."

However, Kosminsky, best known for his BBC1 film Warriors which won the Bafta best drama serial award and his New Labour drama The Project, said that changes to the broadcasting model were unlikely to negatively impact his work and that producers like him would be keen to adopt the model.

"I think producers like me will be running to Netflix and places like that," he said at a Bafta Question Time session on Tuesday night.

Kosminsky also accused the BBC of displaying a "lack of nerve" over the Jimmy Savile scandal and said that the corporation had been fatally damaged by the Hutton inquiry in 2004.

"I think we might have lost trust in the BBC because it has lost trust in itself," he said, on a panel which also included Panorama editor Tom Giles and Sky's director of entertainment channels Stuart Murphy. "The BBC was hacked to bits by Hutton. Although it won the argument it lost the war."

Kosminsky said that post-Hutton the BBC lost its "bravery" and ability to "struts its stuff went out of the window".

He added that this was demonstrated in the BBC's lack of "guts" to pursue the Savile story, saying that its approach demonstrated a lack of "belief".

"In the 1980s the BBC had a confidence and, yes, an arrogance that it does not have now," Kosminsky said.

The BBC's coverage of Savile was defended by Giles on the same panel, which was chaired by Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

"[The edition of Panorama] was not just about the BBC but about what the BBC had failed to have done over the past 30, 40 years," he said.

He added that he would make the programme again even though it was very difficult making a show about people he knew and had "worked with ... for a number of years".

Kosminsky also accused TV drama producers of having a "lazy" tendency to try to show how modern they are by using of social media in their programmes.

"This can be a lazy solution that make you think you are of the new but you are not … It gives producers a warm feeling that they are somehow of the minute," he added.

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