Our two-week-long reveal of this year’s Global 100 listing of the top production companies working in non-fiction and unscripted today — chosen with input from the industry itself and exclusively sponsored by Wrapbook — continues with our look at factual phenoms. These companies have slates that span across various factual sub-genres including true crime, natural history, current affairs and beyond. Keep tuning in throughout this week and next as we continue to unveil our Top Tens in categories including Unscripted, Lifestyle, top Copro Partners and more.
Realscreen’s Global 100 Top Tens: Factual favorites – Plimsoll
Plimsoll
Headquarters:
Bristol, England
NUMBER OF HOURS PRODUCED IN 2024:
70
STAFF:
200
RECENT PROJECTS:
Skyscraper Live (Netflix); Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters (ITV); Are You My First? (Hulu)
UPCOMING TITLES:
Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston (Disney+); Force of Nature (ITV)
A recurring presence in our Global 100 over the years, Plimsoll may be based in Bristol, essentially the natural history production capital of the world, and it may have initially built its reputation with strong wildlife programming. But the Plimsoll of today has a much wider scope of expertise, courtesy of the company’s ambitious drive to explore new genres.
That drive paid off with such projects as Skyscraper Live (pictured) for Netflix, in which free climbing icon Alex Honnold scaled Singapore’s Taipei 101 skyscraper — all 508 meters of it — in a riveting free climb. The special racked up 6.2 million views, and served as a fine example of what the prodco’s recently established adventure division, headed up by James Smith, is capable of. Indeed, days after the Skyscraper Live event, company founder Grant Mansfield told Realscreen: “Adventure can actually bleed into every one of the genres at Plimsoll and there’s definitely a sort of huge appetite for it.”
The company also widened its unscripted aperture to incorporate dating series, with Hulu’s Are You My First?, coproduced with ITV America, and interesting hybrids, such as the horror/wildlife mash-up Nightmares of Nature, produced with Blumhouse for Netflix. BW