At Paramount they are restructuring. The studio, knowing that it has losses, tries to face the new era of content with a more solid strategy: the main thing is its content service, which in the United States is called Paramount, and the premium cable channel Showtime has been integrated into this platform. Now, instead of operating as an entity with its own personality, it has become a content provider for the main service. And as a result, Paramount is stripping him of any shred of personality he had.
For those who are misplaced and do not understand the relevance of Showtime, which served to baptize the latest content platform to come from the North American market, this channel should be framed within the Second Golden Age of Series. HBO paved the way for a new fiction model with The Sopranos, Two Meters Underground or Sex and the City since the late 1990s. Since it was a pay channel, it could elevate sexual content, violence, and swear words. With the beginning of the new millennium, Showtime tried to attract attention in the field of fiction when it found itself in a similar situation.
It was 2000 when Queer as folk arrived, the adaptation of a British series that was interpreted as a Gay Sex and the City. In 2004 he repeated the strategy in the lesbian field with The L Word. But it would not be until a year later that critics would be systematically interested in his productions: Weeds (2005), Dexter (2006), Californication (2007), Nurse Jackie (2009), The big C (2010), Homeland ( 2011), Shameless (2011), Masters of sex (2013) or Ray Donovan (2013).
Taking into account the presence of Weeds, Dexter, Nurse Jackie, Shameless or Ray Donovan at the Emmy Awards or the way in which Homeland dominated the serial conversation and won two awards for best drama series, its importance can be understood. But, with the predominance of streaming services, Showtime began to play a more secondary role in the television industry, which managed to fight with hits like Billions, on the air since 2016, or a Yellowjackets that has made rivers of ink flow in the United States since 2021.
Now, after joining Paramount as Paramount with Showtime, it has been announced that she is not interested in developing original projects. The Gattaca remake developed by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, the makers of Homeland, has gone to the trash can. The same has happened with Seasoned, which the couple formed by Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody were going to star, or with Sweetness, which was going to be an anthology series with a female perspective and developed by Emerald Fennell, winner of the Oscar for best screenplay for A promising young woman.
What is Showtime’s strategy, then? Only those projects developed from Paramount and that recycle intellectual properties from the catalog itself are included in their plans. Thus, while high-profile series such as those mentioned are being ruled out, the plan to turn Billions into a franchise with the possibility of producing Trillions, Millions, Billions: Miami and Billions: London, or the development of series derived from Dexter such as prequels about Dexter Morgan, Trinity Killer or a sequel to Dexter New Blood with Harrison, Dexter’s son, in the leading role.
One of the brands with the most personality of the last quarter of a century, always ready to provoke the viewer with plots then so far-fetched as a kind of heroic serial psychopath or a marijuana-dealing housewife, it becomes a creative recycling plant. It is ironic that, taking into account the channel’s current direction, its name was used to baptize SkyShowtime, Paramount and Universal’s joint venture in European streaming, which does not seem to be at its best either.
