Streaming Soon, Walter Presents Aims to be the HBO of Foreign Language Dramas

Walter Iuzzolino was feeling homesick. Born in Genoa, Italy, and fueled by Catholic guilt, he and his boyfriend became expats in 1995, when they moved to the England. A lifelong television lover, Iuzzolino built a career in the industry, first reading scripts and freelance producing, then commissioning series as a Channel 4 executive and serving as creative director for an independent TV company. In late 2011, Discovery Communications—the American media holding that oversees channels like Animal Planet, TLC, and the Oprah Winfrey Network—purchased his employer, Betty Productions; weeks later, Iuzzolino flew to Italy for Christmas. He’d missed his parents and his brother. He’d missed the Mediterranean Sea. Feeling uncertain about his professional future, he repeated a thought he’d had many times over the years: If it all comes tumbling down, I will go back to Italy for good, pick olives and anchovies, and be a very happy person. 

Over the holiday, his father, Oscar, an art teacher, revisited his own familiar refrain, asking his son when he would begin doing dignified work that he loved, instead of bringing food and fashions shows to the masses. “Always taking a piss out of what I was doing,” Iuzzolino recalled on a recent morning in a massive Midtown Manhattan conference room. Another aspect of life in Italy that Iuzzolino missed was the fact that the most popular television shows come from all over the world. When he was too young to attend school, he was often left in his grandmothers’s care. One was a fan of German police procedurals while the other adored Latin American telenovelas, and there were plenty of both to choose from (although the same few Italian voice actors dubbed everything). England, meanwhile, offered a “fairly narrow palate,” Iuzzolino said at NeueHouse, a private workspace in New York City’s Murray Hill neighborhood, while introducing a screening the night before our interview.

Iuzzolino—a devotee of the dramas produced by American cable channels like AMC, HBO and Showtime—had an idea: a streaming service that gave subscribers access to acclaimed, hit foreign-language television. He wanted to call it World Drama. However, his future Global Series Network [GSN] business partners, Jason Thorp and Jo McGrath, convinced him that Walter Presents was a better choice. In 2013, Iuzzolino quit his job to live on his savings and handpick offerings for their endeavor. Thanks to a guide that listed every country’s television production companies, he made contacts and obtained screeners. He started watching up to 11 hours of television per day; when 2014 concluded, he’d watched 3,500 hours of non-English programming, and his glasses prescription had increased.

“The moment you say, ‘Pffft! I’m going to follow my dream,’ of course the devil comes to tempt you,” Iuzzolino, 48, said in the conference room. During his experimental year in binge-watching, he turned down numerous lucrative job offers. “And then they stop calling you,” he explained. “So I closed the door on my past life.” He continues,
“However disruptive it is with people living in the world, the moment…you do something you love, your life changes so much, every aspect.”

Emboldened by the successes of Spiral, a French police drama that premiered on the BBC in 2008 and became a smash export, and Narcos, the popular semi-subtitled Netflix series about drug trafficking in Colombia, Walter Presents launched with 11 series on Channel 4’s free digital platform, All 4, in January 2016 (Channel 4 owns a majority stake in the company). Today, its UK slate includes 36 shows from 17 nations. While Walter Presents representatives declined to disclose how many UK residents subscribe, they said that the service recorded 17.5 million streams in its first year (for reference, an estimated 64 million people live in the United Kingdom’s four nations). So far, the biggest Walter Present success story is Deutschland 83, a German saga about Cold War-era spies that set a record for the most-watched foreign language drama in UK history, winning an International Emmy Award.

On Thursday, Walter Presents will go live in the US (population: 319 million) making 34 series from 11 countries—Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Norway, and Spain—available online and through multiple platforms. You’ll find shows reminiscent of Lost (The Netherlands’s Flight HS13), Girls (Norway’s Young & Promising), and Fargo‘s second season (The Netherlands’s Black Widow), plus two new selections will be added to the queue each month. An American monthly subscription will cost $6.99 (same as a BritBox membership), but unlike in the UK, the programming will air sans ads (by comparison, an Acorn TV subscription is $4.99/month, Netflix and Hulu Plus are each $7.99/month, Amazon Prime is about $8.25/month, and HBO Now is $14.99/month).

At Neuehouse, Iuzzolino called the timing of the US launch “somehow splendid,” arriving in the seventh week of the Trump administration, whose policies have been described as “anti-immigrant propaganda.” He laughed off claims that his mission includes “tearing down culture borders,” “trying to smuggle in immigrant drama,” and providing a “liberal townie response to the wave of cultural conservatism sweeping through Western democracy” and a certain constitutional monarchy (the UK voted to leave the European Union last summer). “I think [America] has always been at the forefront of every big cultural revolution when it comes to broadcasting,” he said, citing our appreciation of dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. This audience, he believes, “will rejoice in discovering pieces that are just as brilliant,” set against exotic backdrops. And while many favorite US series are international adaptations (the UK begat Shameless, Denmark begat The Killing, Israel begat Homeland), Iuzzolino wants us to become at least as emotionally-invested in the source material.

Walter Presents will not be the first subscription streaming service to specialize in delivering foreign programming Stateside. Back in 2011, Acorn Media Group—a US-based distributor of British television since the early 90s—established Acorn TV, which first presented a catalogue of viewing options from the UK before adding Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to its list. Just last week, BritBox—a partnership between the UK networks BBC and ITV, plus New York City-headquartered AMC Networks—began providing American Anglophiles access to another archive of British television, plus episodes that aired as little as 24 hours ago. “I’m sure BritBox would be great, I’m personally a huge fan of Acorn, but they are assembled collections” starring English-speaking actors, Iuzzolino said (Walter Presents will begin its US run without any shows that originated in the UK). “Our experience in the UK [was] that a world of difference was made by the fact that this was the story of…an individual in a room, watching tapes, and being able to articulate and defend the choices.”

Iuzzolino has recorded a two-minute, adjective-strewn trailer for each Walter Presents series. In these he usually wears a tie and sweater vest, extolling the virtues of a “great story” and “sexy cast.” Physically, he resembles the lovechild of Tina Fey and Simpsons boss Mr. Burns, yet he’s so high energy that you imagine a string of empty espresso cups just out of frame. His British lilt has been scrubbed of sharp edges, and everything he says sounds like he’s hurrying to read you a bedtime story before your parents check that you’re asleep—modulating whispers. Despite how generally effusive he seems—I wish I was as excited about one aspect of my life as Iuzzolino is about each of his shows—he does get picky about his selections, only choosing one series from every 15 options. “If everybody wants it, I don’t want it,” he said. “It’s not me being vain.” Rather, if a show’s components are familiar mainstream money-makers, he starts to wonder, “Why should I follow Netflix or the BBC? Our job is to innovate and bring great stories from places you don’t expect.”

Whereas Americans who live in big cities use foreign filmgoing as an excuse for socially-conscious nights on the town (at cinemas that don’t cater to explosive franchise fare), Walter Presents wants to make foreign television much more accessible, part of your daily relaxation routine. In countries with as many overworked people as the UK and the US, he says, “the short, spare time you have, you want to invest well.” While each Walter Presents show is captioned with subtitles, “The assumption that our shows are hard work is not true,” said McGrath, the director of marketing and communications for Walter Presents and GSN, explaining that each one is beautiful, affecting, and engrossing. These are not series to watch while cooking or texting, and as such, Iuzzolino says, “You love it more. You invest more,” not that he has anything against vegging out (in that past life, he helped bring shows like Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory and Country House Rescue into UK living rooms). Citing the inconsistent quality of subtitling present in foreign releases, McGrath notes that detail-oriented Walter Presents has one of the world’s best subtitling companies caption every episode, functioning “like a second director” to enhance show enjoyment.

When asked about goals, Iuzzolino said, “I would like to be up in about 15 countries in two years time.” As Walter Presents becomes present in more territories, “the amount of money we’ll have to clear the rights for production will become more significant.” While there are no plans to craft strict Walter Presents originals—”there will always be,” for example, “the Norwegian channel that originated that idea in the first place”—Iuzzolino and his partners hope to forge more “meaningful co-productions,” in which they will “acquire shows very early on” to avoid a bidding war, then “work very closely with creatives, super actors, super writers, and directors, and kind of go, ‘Okay, what are we going to make now?'” These co-productions appear to be at work already; for the US launch, Walter Presents is championing two shows in particular: Spin, a French production that premiered in 2012 about “spin doctors” employed by rival politicians, and Valkyrien, Norway’s recent brainchild about a doomsday prepper who helps a doctor open a (literal and figurative) underground hospital. Actors Grégory Fitoussi (Spin) and Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen (Valkyrien) participated in the NeueHouse event promoting Walter Presents. Despite the international star power, McGrath said, “Walter is our biggest marketing tool, obviously. He’s not a secret.” McGrath still aims to get the word out: so far, Walter Presents has under 200 Twitter followers and about 500 Instagram followers, but 3,000-plus likes on its Facebook page. Plans are underway for a social media campaign (including paid advertisements), cinema screenings, events and media tie-ins.

Before he became a television curator, before he left Italy, Iuzzolino earned a PhD in American Literature. His loves of books and television and streaming, of our most antiquated and innovative entertainment pursuits, are reconciled quite easily. “I think that scripted drama now occupies the same cultural position that serialized fiction occupied in the Victorian era,” he said. “There was something exquisitely commercial about these writers, but also, it was a pure sense of art in what they were doing and they were all reflecting their own society and how it was changing…I think that Wilkie Collins and Henry James and George Eliot—if they were alive today—would be writing Mad Men.“