Walter Iuzzolino

Black Widow

Valkyrien

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Fill 1
August 18, 2017
In The Mix

Watching With Walter

A personally curated streaming service acquaints U.S. viewers with worldwide dramas.

Benji Wilson

Walter Iuzzolino wants you to watch more TV.

The same goes for any channel head, you might say, but Iuzzolino’s mission is artistic as well as commercial — he wants you to watch more of his kind of TV. And if you want to know what that is, you only need head over to the streaming service that bears his name: Walter Presents.

“It’s exclusively dedicated to the very best drama from around the world,” Iuzzolino explains at his London office. “It’s all product coming from outside the U.S. and the U.K., and it’s with English subtitles. So, in my mind, this is an HBO or Showtime with subtitles.”

That’s easy to say, harder to do. International drama has always been a niche offering in the U.S. But Iuzzolino is adamant that Walter Presents needn’t be some kind of art-house schmooze.

“I didn’t want this to be like a European independent movie–type club — that was the opposite of what I wanted.” What did he have in mind? “What HBO, Showtime and AMC have achieved — the ability to bind together commerce and art. Historically they have created stuff that’s shiny, glossy, sexy, commercial and very entertaining — but with production values and a level of artistry that elevates it.”

Iuzzolino’s own background is as varied as the shows in his “collection,” as he calls it. He is Italian but has worked as a producer and program executive in Britain for more than a decade. Before he began working in television, he was a literature major, with serialized Victorian fiction his specialty and Henry James the subject of his doctorate.

Novelists William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and, in particular, Charles Dickens all released their work in installments, and Iuzzolino — though he’s not the first to say it — is adamant that writers like that would be working on shows like Mad Men or House of Cards were they alive today.

“They were artists, of course, but they had an incredible ability to craft great stories [as if they wanted readers] to purchase the magazine every week or every month. Television has gone into that now, and drama in particular. So, for me the crucial elements are that the work is not snobbish or elitist, but broad and mainstream.

"The first element of my selection process, for  example, is that all of the shows need to be big hits in their country of origin.”

Walter Presents launched in the U.K. in January 2016 and this past spring arrived in the U.S., where it is available for $6.99 a month.

Its initial offerings included Valkyrien, a high-concept Norwegian thriller set in an illegal underground clinic in an old Oslo bomb shelter; Black Widow, a Dutch Mafia drama in the Sopranos mold, but with  a woman at the head of the family; the French political show Spin, a huge hit that was spookily prescient in predicting Brexit; and Flight HS13, a Dutch thriller  about a woman tracking down her missing husband after the plane he was  supposedly on crashes and it is revealed he never boarded the flight. 

Looking for a through-line among the series he has picked — apart from  the subtitles — Iuzzolino talks about television in terms usually reserved for art  criticism. His father was an art critic, and he swoons over narrative structure as if it were classical architecture.

The aesthetics of the best TV drama get similar highbrow treatment: “To me, shoddy photography is unacceptable: so many times there are great stories that become inaccessible because they’re ugly.”

But Iuzzolino understands that at this moment in television history, with some 450 new scripted shows released in the U.S. last year, finding something new to watch is hardly a problem. So what need does Walter Presents serve?

“The wave of cultural conservatism that’s sweeping Western society is strange and unsettling,” he states. “So now there’s an argument for real windows onto other worlds, other cultures and other societies. More than ever, being isolated culturally is a bad thing.”

And as the name suggests, Iuzzolino’s collection reflects his personal  picks — this is one curation service that steers clears of algorithms. Streamers get the recommendations of a man who watches more than five hours of television a day, plus another two-and-a-half-hour mini-binge after dinner. 

“We’re short of time, all of us obviously, and there’s a lot of product out  there,” he says. “So having that real, whittled-down quality-over-quantity selection might be interesting for viewers. And I think that the offer is genuinely different — you don’t find this stuff anywhere else. Hopefully you’ll find some gems you never knew existed.”


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 7, 2017

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