The BBC is killing it in the ratings, but the landscape of TV drama is changing...

In The Little Drummer Girl there’s an awful lot riding on Florence Pugh’s young shoulders.

Her fragile left-wing actress Charlie is the only hope Mossad agents Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Shannon have as they hunt a Palestinian terrorist. And as the follow-up from the team that brought you last year’s smash hit, The Night Manager, this latest John le Carré adaptation is expected to bring the BBC ratings by the truckload this autumn. We were told people weren’t watching mainstream TV any more. But then Jed Mercurio’s political thriller, Bodyguard, starring Richard Madden and Keeley Hawes, drew an audience of 10.4m viewers, the biggest for drama since a Doctor Who Christmas special was watched by 11.7m people in 2008.

This should have been impossible. Research from telly watchdog Ofcom last year found eight in 10 adults binge watch shows rather than wait for weekly instalments. In March this year, research showed that 16- to 24-year-olds spent more time watching Netflix than all the BBC’s channels put together. But the week after Bodyguard’s finale, the first episode of The Cry — starring Jenna Coleman as the distraught mum of a missing baby — got overnight ratings of 5.7m. You could almost hear the sighs of relief from Broadcasting House. The BBC is beleaguered on so many fronts — on pay, on audience, on finance, on politics — that a little bit of love must have been welcome.

Recently the corporation has felt a little like the Light Brigade, riding into the valley of death while trying to follow wildly conflicting and potentially suicidal orders — serve everyone, get big ratings, spend less, charge! — and being bombarded from all sides. There was the row when head of comedy Shane Allen suggested white Oxbridge graduates like the Pythons wouldn’t get a comedy series today. And another when disability campaigners protested the ‘ableist’ casting of Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton as Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man. Then last month, David Attenborough waded in, criticising the BBC’s arts coverage: "If you’re a public service broadcaster, people of all kinds should be catered for. It’s not enough simply to say: 'Well, it doesn’t get a big enough audience.'"

It was almost an implicit criticism of ratings-chasing shows like Bodyguard. The corporation is also dealing with bad press generated by the gender pay gap scandal, accusations of bias levelled against presenter Laura Kuenssberg by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, complaints about Nigel Farage’s ubiquitous presence on Question Time, and the constant, ticking time bomb of the licence fee. So you can’t blame the Beeb for breathing a sigh of relief that, in the drama department, it is knocking it out of the park. "The BBC is in the middle of a purple patch in drama right now," says Michael Pickard, editor of TV magazine Drama Quarterly. "And it’s hard to overestimate how important a successful drama is. It’s the defining genre for any network. That’s why Netflix launched its original programming with House of Cards. It’s a calling card. And the drive to make your reputation through a good drama is partly why there are so many around at the moment." He’s not wrong.

US cable channel FX’s CEO John Landgraf revealed that the number of new scripted shows launched in the US in 2017 — that’s brand new drama or comedy series — was 487. You’d have to watch one and a half complete series a day to see it all, leading Landgraf to dub this the era of ‘peak TV’. With Netflix spending unhinged amounts of money on new programming — a reported £10 billion in 2018 — a huge global battle is being waged for access to your eyes. It will be fought between TV stations, cable channels and some 500 services across the world offering streaming video on demand, such as Netflix, or ‘over the top’ internet TV, like YouTube. Quality dramas are the shock troops of this war. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s dark comedy Killing Eve is a case in point. Sandra Oh’s MI5 officer and Jodie Comer’s charmingly psychopathic assassin played a kind of violently sensual cat and mouse with each other, leading them — despite the body count — to wind up in bed together. In the US, the show broke ratings records for BBC America and in the UK the entire series was dropped on iPlayer while going out weekly on BBC1. None of this is cheap.

Game of Thrones costs £7.7 million per episode and the first series of The Crown cost £100 million. Amazon is spending almost £4 billion on Amazon Prime, while Apple TV and Facebook TV have ambitions to reach the same kind of spending. The BBC’s television budget, in comparison, is £2.4 billion across BBC1, 2, 3, 4, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News, iPlayer and assorted regional channels. Ironically, the BBC is pulling this off partly thanks to working with services like Netflix and Amazon. Netflix helped pay for the classical epic Troy, while Mad Men’s cable channel AMC jointly produced The Night Manager and FX came on board for Taboo. Producing a high-end drama in the UK costs around £2 million according to Ampere Analysis. UK broadcasters rarely pay this much, so anything from one quarter to half the budget has to come from co-productions. Money, of course, isn’t everything. ITV’s Vanity Fair — starring Olivia Cooke as a mischievous Becky Sharp — benefitted from Amazon money but struggled to attract viewers after going head to head with Bodyguard. Why did the BBC win that particular battle? The talented Keely Hawes clearly had a significant role but she was deftly aided by Piers Wenger, controller of drama commissioning across the BBC, who used an increasingly common and fiendishly complex blend of on- and offline.

Careful dropping of cliffhanger episodes online drove the 1.3 million 16- to 34-year-old iPlayer viewers of the show to BBC1 as the story unfolded — helping keep its ratings high and giving the channel an audience people thought they’d lost. With key shows like Bodyguard — or Hugo Blick’s eight-part Rwandan war crime drama Black Earth Rising, starring Michaela Coel — Wenger uses ‘series stacking’: leaving programmes on iPlayer beyond their usual 30 days so viewers who arrive late to a show can be sure they are able to catch up. Picking up an algorithmic trick from the streamers, those who sign in to iPlayer can receive ‘if you watched that you might like this’ emails. It’s positively technocratic. "There’s so much content, so many platforms and so much new drama that everything has to create a noise to get attention," Wenger explains. "It’s a mixed economy. Box set shows can take longer to develop character and story, while mainstream ones benefit from shock endings and cliffhangers."

You need to write and schedule to coax the box set audience on to the main channel to share the water cooler moments writers like Jed Mercurio deliver. The key is finding the writers — in the UK we’ve got theatre which helps writers find their voice, but we’ve also got the unusual luxury of shorter-run shows.’ That was certainly the appeal for The Little Drummer Girl co-writer Michael Lesslie, whose previous credits, including Assassin’s Creed, have mainly been movies. "Because there’s so much TV out there, when I see a series that will run forever I’m really not sure if I want to commit to it," he argues. "I think audiences are getting hungry for resolution rather than open-ended stories, so the finite story of a mini-series is such a relief." With Le Carré, Skarsgård, Shannon and legendary South Korean director Park Chan-wook attached, The Little Drummer Girl oozes experience. That’s great, but new talent is vital, Wenger argues. Hence Informer, starring Paddy Considine in a tale of a family caught up in the war on terror. The script is from newcomers Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani and it’s the TV debut for lead actor Nabhaan Rizwan.

"Younger viewers want diverse voices, not the same old shows," argues the show’s producer Nick Brown. "BBC1 felt the right place for a mainstream show telling a family story with warmth and wit. It’s the scale and breadth of audience that big single broadcasters have versus so many niche players with small, select audiences." The danger is that the BBC has grown used to co-production money just as the streaming services are leaving the game. Netflix has already stopped co-productions and global players such as Apple want all rights to everything. This could halve broadcaster budgets and put paid to this purple patch.

According to BBC director general Tony Hall, spending on British television will plummet by £500m a year over the next decade as tech giants Amazon, Apple and Netflix grow, the advertising market declines and the BBC makes cuts after the latest licence fee settlement. "Investment decisions are likely to focus increasingly on a narrow range of very expensive, very high-end content," he said, "big bankers that they can rely on to have international appeal and attract large, global audiences. We have to face the reality that the British content we value and rely upon is under serious threat." So shows like Bodyguard will continue to attract licence fee cash, but the danger is that the diversity and range that Wenger cherishes will fall between the gaps.

The BBC may be winning its battle right now — but is it losing its soul?

Illustrations by Michelle Thompson