Mediaweek has been championing the Netflix drama Territory since it was released in late October.
The drama from production houses Ronde and Easy Tiger has been the #1 TV show for Netflix in Australia since its release. The drama has also been a hot property globally. Territory ranked #2 on the Netflix global chart this week and topped the daily global chart on a number of days since release.
Netflix is having a year to remember in terms of hit shows, so for Territory to make such a mark is a massive achievement. Overnight the streaming platform revealed so far, Territory has been viewed globally 6.3m times. The latest data indicates it is top 10 in TV in 74 countries on Netflix.
To celebrate the achievement, Mediaweek pulled co-creators Ben Davies (Ronde) and Rob Gibson (Easy Tiger) away from their next productions to get some insights into how they created and then pitched the series.
This follows on our recent interview with the director of Territory, Greg McLean.
See also:
How new Netflix original Territory is taking outback Australia to the rest of the world
Director Greg McLean a key ingredient in making this a major TV blockbuster.
Territory director Greg McLean with co-creators Ben Davies and Rob Gibson
When during the creative process did you feel you had something special?
Ben Davies: It was immediately exciting back in 2017. It didn’t start to become a thing until Rob and I started talking more about it. And then, it wasn’t until Netflix go, “We love it”, that we actually started to believe that it could actually turn into a show.
Easy Tiger has had a lot of wins lately, what is the secret to pitching shows?
Rob Gibson: “We do our prep. We always work with great storytellers. And Colly [Easy Tiger founder Ian Collie] and I are storytellers ourselves.
That’s sort of how it works here. The model is great producers, great writers – creatives coming together. That’s how you get great material that you then take out to the market and pitch.
Working with Ian is key. He’s the best in the biz as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I wanted to come and work with him.
I also had the advantage and the great joy of working at Stan for five years. Not only building the business, but seeing what it was like on the commissioning side from the very early days of streaming through to the point where it became mainstream in Australia.
Ben is just an excellent storyteller and has an incredible eye for story. We felt from very early on that it was going to be a pretty great partnership and it’s proven to be so.
Robert Taylor as Colin Lawson in Territory
Ben Davies moves from unscripted to premium drama
Ben Davies: The same principles apply. We’re always looking for worlds that we think audiences are going to be fascinated by. We then pull back the veil to reveal the codes and conventions of those worlds.
The key thing is delivering a really great story. With factual, you’re putting most of it together. You go out with very clear intentions of what you think you might get, but then you put it together in post.
With scripted, it’s the other way around. You’re writing it first. But the principles remain the same.
In this partnership I’m relying on Rob’s and Easy Tiger’s expertise in the scripted space.
Trying to add value by bringing the real world in. When we’re up there on the station we’re using real machines and real people and the storytelling is motivated by campfire stories.
There’s a really good crossover in this where the two of us work together and bring completely different skills, but they’ve meshed together really well.
Keeping it real
Rob Gibson: It’s in-camera filmmaking. There’s next to no CGI. There’s little bits here and there, but we’re not crafting whole scenes and they’re not owned by CGI.
There’s 3,500 cattle in some shots and we have real actors, world-class actors on horses with 1,500 head of cattle moving around them. There are real choppers. You can’t beat actually having those things, the material things themselves, in shot and the audience feel it because they know it’s not CGI.
If there is a really key ingredient to the success of this show, it was figuring out, which took us some time, how to put together the business of the station. The real business of a giant industrial cattle station like that with the scripted drama production model.
I just don’t know whether that would have been possible without having Ben’s experience in filmed storytelling in those real worlds as the guide for how to integrate our drama production model.
They’re all real operations. There’s nothing fake about them. If you can figure out how to plug into that world that’s there, it does all the work for you.
It’s very difficult getting there and it’s expensive because you’re so far from anywhere else.
Once you’re there, you turn on a camera and you’re just getting gold wherever you point it. But there was a lot of work in figuring out how to make that integration work.
Anna Torv as Emily Lawson in Territory
The original vision was for a big production
Ben Davies: The scale of it is exactly how we envisaged it and we were just fortunate that we had Netflix as a partner who was able to help us execute on that. Instead of someone trying to shrink it all down and asking, ‘Oh, can you tell the same story with less?’
It is exactly as we envisaged it and we just went in with the attitude that this is what we want to make and let’s go for it.
Without a Netflix, there may not have been a Territory
Ben Davies: It would have been much more complicated to finance it, that’s for sure.
Rob Gibson: And we probably would still have been working on the financing right now.
That was the joy of being able to get Netflix to fall in love with it straight away. Part of what they fell in love with was the scale of it. They knew it was the sort of series that could really make a mark on their Australian slate.
Casting Territory: Meet the Lawsons
Rob Gibson: Casting is tricky at the best of times. We love it, and it’s one of the most important parts of filmmaking. Greg McLean [director] certainly takes a very keen interest in casting. We had to start with our key character. Clearly that is Emily Lawson [played by Anna Torv], finding the right person for that role was going to be critical.
We brought on Anousha Zarkesh [casting director] early on, and she’s just fantastic. There’s nothing she can’t do in terms of bringing together fabulous ensembles and unexpected combinations that really work beautifully, and you can see it all on screen.
It was made more difficult than usual by the fact that there was a SAG strike on when we were trying to put it all together.
Anna Torv as Emily Lawson was the first person we started speaking about. Anna is so fantastic. I couldn’t think of anyone else who could hold that character. It’s a really difficult character to play because she is carrying something with her through the season while she’s doing everything else that she’s doing.
That includes being a total badass, taking on the pretty toxic patriarchy that Colin Lawson [played by Robert Taylor] has established on the station. Along with everything else that she has to carry. Even though we’ve seen the episodes a hundred times, I can sit there all day watching Anna play that role. She’s so fantastic.
Michael Dorman as Graham Lawson in Territory
It started with Anna, and then Mike Dorman [playing Graham Lawson] came very quickly after that. We had to chase him down hard. Like Anna, he’s a busy man.
He’s got work in the US. He’s living over there. But I think once we had those two in our sights, it became a little easier.
It was just a great process going through some of the other options for the other cast. Discovering new talent like Kyla Day. Sam Corlett had been working a little bit before, but to me, this is a total breakout role for him, for a lot of them, actually. Working with Sam Delitch and Robbie Taylor was great too.
In Robbie you couldn’t find a lovelier guy to play the nastiest man in the top end. He’s just a beautiful man and a brilliant actor.
The Netflix guys were really supportive of our choices.
Ben Davies: We made a big promise that there are going to be outback characters that you’ve heard about and never seen before. If we didn’t get it right, the whole conceit falls away pretty quickly. We were fortunate that we had a cast that nailed it.
Did the script alter much during filming?
Ben Davies: The plot was pretty well mapped out. There were minor modifications. Maybe a location change or something like that.
More broadly, we had a vision for a story, which is the one that we presented on screen. I went back not that long ago and looked at the pitch document that we presented to Netflix and read through it again and it’s pretty much the show.
Rob Gibson: That comes with great preparation. It is the usual part of drama production that you take your scripts and then when you get into pre pre-production you’re starting to accommodate the real world a little bit more. That can be easier or harder depending on your subject matter.
But we had cracked that model of integrating our production model into the station operations. Helped of course by the work Ben has done in telling factual stories in those environments. We had the relationships and we did the prep work.
We started pre pre-production very early and did a lot of recces with various departmental heads going up there and starting the conversations with the people who would become their counterparts on the station side.
If you do all the right prep, you then flick the switch and the magic happens.
Territory cast and crew at a preview screening
Ben Davies: Paul Ranford, the producer, was up on recce after recce. That gave us such solid footing that when the cameras started rolling we didn’t have to change much because it was well mapped out.
Rob Gibson: There were times when it was stressful. Working in 40 degree heat when making your schedule for the day is a big ask. We had an incredibly hard-working the crew and cast who delivered even at times in brutal conditions.
There was this incredible esprit de corps and just great sense of adventure in being out in the middle of nowhere making a big, epic show like this.
Will there be a second season of Territory?
Ben Davies: We’d be home drawn and cornered if we didn’t do it for the audience because they all want to know. There’s a few questions that remain unanswered. We’ve got answers.
What about a prequel to learn more about Daniel and Susie Lawson?
Rob Gibson: The Territory cinematic universe. Absolutely. Fantastic.
See also: Territory – Mediaweek TV Guide for hit Netflix family drama set in outback Australia