Scandinavian success as European policy dilemma: creative Europe’s funding for TV drama co-productions, 2014-20

Abstract

Scandinavian success as European policy dilemma Creative Europe's funding for TV drama co-productions, 2014-20This article surveys the fiction productions that received funding from Creative Europe's TV Programming scheme 2014-2020. The evaluation shows that most funding went to North-Western Europe with Scandinavia surpassing Europe's big TV producing nations. The geographical and genre imbalances in the TV scheme must be seen in the light of the long-established close collaboration between Germany and primarily the Scandinavian countries and the profiled position of "Nordic Noir" crime fiction as the engine that drives forward international collaboration. This trend exemplifies European policy dilemmas emerging from television's role in the intersections of economy and culture. North-European countries appear well-equipped in advance to meet the criteria of Creative Europe through established collaboration, while differences in the media systems and production cultures have kept producers in the South and East of Europe from even applying. The EU funding scheme may, thus, have strengthened already strong relationships rather than creating new ones.

Creating Information Infrastructure for Transnational Co-operation in Television: Nordvision in the 1960s–1970s

“…16 Nordvision has even been credited as one factor behind the recent international success of Scandinavian drama series: research on the European Commission's support for television fiction between 2014 and 2020 found that Scandinavian countries were exceptionally successful in obtaining funding, which researchers saw as a result of the decades long institutionalization of co-production relationships within Nordvision. 17 My aim in this article is not, however, to evaluate Nordvision in terms of success or failure, but to describe some of the work that has gone into building this network of Nordic television organizations.…”