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Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which, each fortnight, we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track. So we’re going to do the hard work for you.
As MIPCOM kicks off, we shine a spotlight this week on a Married at First Sight versus Survivor hybrid in Stranded on Honeymoon Island, which was birthed in Denmark but landed first in Belgium before setting sail around the world. The series sees fledgling couples dropped on a remote island and left to fend for themselves. What’s not to like? The BBC and Channel 7, amongst others, clearly see the potential, and Stranded‘s sales team will be looking to make some noise in Cannes this week.
Name: Stranded on Honeymoon Island
Country: Denmark
Network: VTM Belgium
Producer: Snowman Productions
For fans of: Married at First Sight, Survivor
Distributor: Seven.One Studios International
If you thought Married at First Sight was high octane, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Set to dominate formats chatter at this week’s MIPCOM, Stranded on Honeymoon Island is the product of a simple thought from Danish formats guru Rasmus Steentoft and his team at Sno wman Productions: “What would happen if we took the success of Married at First Sight and combined it with Survivor?,” Steentoft tells us in the week leading up to the Cannes confab.
The show emerged during a pandemic brainstorm when producers were wondering when they would next be able to get ideas on screen. In Stranded on Honeymoon Island, which has just struck its biggest deal so far by selling to the BBC, six couples are matched by experts. Immediately after committing themselves to each other in an intimate ceremony, they are dramatically abandoned in an idyllic isolation for the adventure of a lifetime. The fledgling relationships are subsequently put to the test as the couples live together and fend for themselves with few resources.
“To begin with we thought this would never work but sometimes you just cannot let go of the idea,” Steentoft says. “So we came up with the logline, ‘Can the toughest journey of your life be the quickest route to love?’ and we immediately loved that. During the pandemic we really needed some escapism and just thought the world was hungering for a show like this.”
Snowman has previous, having created Married at First Sight (MAFS), the smash format in which couples are matched and meet for the first time at the altar. In a similar vein to that show, Steentoft says Stranded started making sense when the team first thought about the images that could be used for promotion.
“It’s so easy to promote because you just have to think of a stranded married couple in their wedding outfits with torn hair on a desert island,” he adds. “We then combined that with the knowhow we have from MAFS in the relationship and reality space.”
A core challenge, Steentoft explains, was finding a location deserted enough to work, but he says that once the team had settled on Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines they got to work and it was relatively simple to make.
Notably, amid a risk-averse pandemic-impacted formats landscape, Snowman landed its first greenlight not in its native Denmark but in Belgium, with local network VTM taking the gamble before U.S. streamer Max bought it in its home nation further down the line. And VTM’s gamble paid off. The VTM1 premiere more than doubled slot average and continued to perform well into Season 2, distributor Seven.One Studios International tells us.
“Belgium is one of the few territories in Europe that is still going for paper formats,” says Steentoft. “The rest of the world feels conservative at the moment.”
MAFS seller Seven.One (formerly Red Arrow) has been distributing the show for around 18 months and MD Tim Gerhartz says VTM “deserves a lot of credit” for commissioning something that involves travel to far flung places and went against what networks were ordering at the time. He adds that Stranded’s potential was obvious from the get-go.
“It fills a gap,” he adds. “There is plenty of dating out there but adventure dating didn’t really exist to such an extent and the core USP of the show is aspirational and about finding love. Snowman can be proud of the results.”
The series has now landed in 10 territories including key format hunting grounds of the UK and Channel 7 in Australia. The latter, Gerhartz says, “tells drama within the reality by taking the protagonists seriously.” This version is “by far the best reality show I’ve ever seen in my life,” according to Steentoft.
He believes that networks around the world are continuing to act conservatively in the formats market despite the success of breakouts like The Traitors, including in his native Scandinavia, but says “there are glimpses of life” in the current landscape.
Giving Denmark its due
Denmark has birthed many big formats over the years and is maybe not always given its due, but for Steentoft this is water off a duck’s back.
“I don’t care about the rest of Denmark I care about Snowman,” he says. “As a Dane you come from a small territory and grow up with the idea that you have to have an international focus so we think outside the box. By international standards we are extremely small but in Scandinavia we are a top-earning company. This has made it easier to get attention from international broadcasters.”
Nevertheless, Gerhartz says The Traitors is still taking up a fair bit of formats airtime as he gets set for MIPCOM.
“Around 80% of all new ideas have a Traitors element to them,” he says of the general state of the market. “And then there are a lot of tech and AI-related ideas on the market. These will be big topics.”
Stranded on Honeymoon Island may not be AI, but when you’ve got the might of MAFS mixed in with some Survivor behind you, you can’t go far wrong.
