Endemol Shine Finland bets on Supporting Actor - sustainability and diversity

The 8x25’ series will be written and directed by Niklas Lindgren, credited for the series Idiomatic and comedy feature Bad Women, sold internationally by REinvent.

Supporting Actor follows a talented but difficult actor, who finds out he’s always stuck in supporting roles because he’s cursed. To find out who cursed him and why, he has a lot of burned bridges to cross. “It’s a dramedy with hints of supernatural,” said Endemol Shine Finland’s Head of Scripted Max Malka, who has known Lindgren since film school. At its core, the series will be dealing with success. How do you actually measure it? And it will offer a satirical take on the industry as well” Malka added.

The TV project is due to start filming in the spring 2023 for the Finnish commercial channel Nelonen and its streaming service Ruutu.

Supporting Actor will be Banijay Group’s Finnish label Endemol Shine Finland’s second scripted show after Dance Brothers, Netflix’s first original Finnish-language series, set to premiere globally in 2023 and at a later date on Netflix’s co-production partner Yle.

The 10-part series is created and produced by Malka (Aurora, Nerd: Dragonslayer 666) who also serves as co-writer with Reeta Ruotsalainen (Bubble, Arctic Circle).

The show centres around the two brothers Roni and Sakari, as they struggle to make a living as professional dancers. To help finance their dance dreams they decide to start their own club. Their unique club and impressive dance routines quickly bring them fame. Soon artistic ambitions and personal relationships collide with commercial demands, putting the brothers’ relationship to the test.

Newcomer Roderick Kabanga is cast as Roni and Sakari is played by Samuel Kujala who worked with Malka on the three seasons of the YA cult series Nerd: Dragonslayer 666.

Speaking about the unique collaboration between Netflix and the public broadcaster Yle, Malka said the partners had a very close partnership from script stage and were very supportive. “They took the editorial lead and trusted filmmaker Taito Kawata who has a long experience in directing music and dance videos.“

A big fan of dance as an art form and film genre, Malka said the series, with a strong returning potential, will be “packed with drama, entertainment, dance and emotion. But for the moment we’re fully focused on making season 1 as good as possible.”

The highly esteemed producer who joined Endemol Shine Finland in 2019, three months after Covid started, said she’s had to slightly readjust her editorial strategy. “When I joined the company, I wanted to produce both feature films and series, but after the pandemic, we’ve had to put our feature film ambitions on hold.”

In the meantime, Malka has beefed up her team by hiring producer Paria Eskandari (line producer ofCompartment No6) and screenwriter Leo Viirret.

Eskandari will now reinstate the production house’s film line-up, with an emphasis on high quality projects for a wide audience.

Malka sees multiple benefits of being part of the Banijay family, from sharing knowledge with the sister production brands in Europe to bringing to fruition a fully-fledged sustainability and diversity strategy. “If you’re a small independent company, you have to pay your staff and might not afford the extra costs to cover environmental sustainability. But this is possible with Endemol Shine Finland /Banijay and they are fully committed to achieving these goals,” she points out.

The series Dance Brothers was in fact fully produced with the Bafta’s sustainability consortium ‘albert’, designed to reduce carbon imprint.

“It was quite a complicated process, as we had to apply sustainable techniques from pre to post-production, in production design, costumes, food, locations, and we had to hire one person fully dedicated to collecting data. I look forward to seeing if we will get the ‘albert’ certificate and to sharing the learnings. In any case our show will prove that we don’t need to compromise the quality, nor the story to produce in a sustainable way,” Malka observes.

“It is our responsibility as a mass media entertainment provider, to take the right measures to be go green and to bring diversity to the screens in a genuine way,” she said.