Highlights market

In 2018-2019 the supply of original Italian TV fiction totaled 495 hours (+ 62 compared to the last season). Also the number of titles (50 in all) have slightly increased (+ 3).

Rai drives the Italian scripted TV industry development. Along with the historic soap opera Un posto al sole, Rai has added a second daily Il paradiso delle signore (a long-term series originally created for primetime and eventually converted into a daily with 40’ episodes – a major innovation for the Italian daily production), thus increasing its offer by 80 hours compared to the last season. 

Rai is once again at the heart of the Italian TV fiction industry, further consolidating its leadership role on the market by producing 77% of the total number of TV fiction in hours (71% in 2017-2018).

Overall, Rai Fiction has wrapped an extremely positive season:

• it produces for four networks (Raiuno, Raidue, Raitre, Rai Gulp);
• thanks to the new daily, it once again dominates Raiuno’s daytime;
• it has increased primetime ratings of Raiuno (which presently offers more than half the total number of evenings programmed by all broadcasters), internationalizing its production thanks to prestigious international co-productions (Medici, L’amica geniale, The Name of the Rose).

This season should be considered a sort of year zero for the TV fiction of Mediaset, a private broadcaster that has been struggling with a radical rethinking of its editorial and production strategies. Against a significant reduction in the volume of hours compared to the previous season, the number of titles has however remained unchanged. Combining these two data, it can be assumed that one of the fundamental strategies implemented by Mediaset has been the reduction of the length of its serial production. After years of lengthy primetime series (the super-soap), now Canale 5 has chosen English formats for its primetime slot (6-8 episodes of 50’) .

One of the new events of the season on the Italian TV landscape is the increase of limited series (in Mediaset but also in Rai), a format that has been internationally imposed by all platforms, Netflix in the lead. On the Italian market, limited series (3-4 evenings and a complete narrative arc) seem to have substituted the former two-episode miniseries (now virtually zeroed) and the medium-length series (6-8 evenings).

Other Italian commissioners

Sky, Disney, Fox (which returns to produce Italian fiction after many years of absence) and the Netflix and TIMVision platforms offer a total of 12% the seasonal volume, a figure that recalls last years. The number of titles have instead increased from 7 to 11, proving that short seriality is the most popular format.