Boyzone Live Concert Coming To Sky From Curious Films

EXCLUSIVE: A Toxic Love Story producer Curious Films is moving into the live space with a new Boyzone concert film following the smash success of its Sky doc.

Last year, Boyzone: No Matter What became Sky’s most-watched unscripted series of all time and was the catalyst for the Irish superstars getting back together. Curious Films has subsequently produced a fourth and fifth episode showing Ronan Keating and co reforming and we can reveal has also recorded the band’s live concert from the Emirates Stadium, London, which took place over the summer and will air later this year on Sky.

The Boyzone: One for the Road live one-off is a first for a UK documentaries indie that has spent the past few years nurturing a reputation for making big true crime and pop culture hits for the streamers including Netflix’s A Toxic Love Story, and Hulu’s Welcome to the Family and Caroline Flack: Search for the Truth.

Curious boss Dov Freedman said the decision to make the live show “came quite late in the day” and involved a much faster turnaround than the London-headquartered outfit is used to.

“[The live show] was a refreshing addition to the retrospective work we do,” said Freedman. “We can spend 18 months or two years making crime documentaries, whereas the concert film had a much faster turnaround. It involved a different dynamic, different producers and different skills. We had around 40 staff working on it and shot it with about 25 cameras. It looked fantastic, and we’re definitely looking to do more in that space.”

Curious’ timing is good as the streamers double down on live content mainly in areas like music and sport. Netflix UK recently forged a commissioning team dedicated to live.

Curious’ “knew we had something” when it started filming the first Boyzone doc and the “pain close to the surface” from the band members became clear, Freedman said.

Things got even clearer when the band’s former manager Louis Walsh was interviewed and “they all had different perspectives on the same story.” Walsh has described claims made by band members in the doc as “fiction rather than fact.”

“The first time we got in a room with the band, we sensed that we were onto something,” said Freedman. “They were all going to be very honest, which felt refreshing.”

“Outsider perspective”

Curious is keen to do more live but will continue to mainly do what it does best, Freedman said, focusing on true crime and popular culture. It recently entered a new era following the departure of Freedman’s co-founder Charlie Russell, who has been replaced by the promoted MD Nicky Varley, someone who Freedman said has “played an important role in building our relationships with Hulu, Netflix and National Geographic.”

Curious’ approach in part over recent years has been to examine “big American ‘ripped from the headlines’ stories” and deliver them with “craft,” Freedman said. He reckons British docmakers have a particular sensibility, which suits this approach.

“We always saw America as a good opportunity,” he added. “This isn’t new – companies that came before Curious have been doing it much longer – but we believed our Britishness and outsider status could help us get access to stories that U.S. producers might not be able to access in quite the same way. That outsider perspective can also give us a different approach to telling the stories.”

Shows may have aired in the past about the subjects of Welcome to the Family or A Toxic Love Story, but Freedman questioned whether they were “made too quickly or reacted to events too soon.” “When we take on a story, we try to tell the definitive version,” he added. “That’s often about timing.”

In the case of these two shows it paid off.

Following a jaw-dropping revenge plot involving a newly-married U.S. Marshal and his ex-girlfriend, A Toxic Love Story has hit numerous Netflix top 10s since launching over the summer. Welcome to the Family, which tells of the brutal murder of law professor Dan Markel, has spent days as Disney+’s no. 1 show in both the U.S. and UK.

“If you look across Curious’s slate over the last couple of years we’ve been able to deliver large audiences at a time when audiences are fragmented and competition for viewers has never been higher,” said Freedman.

He said Welcome to the Family has kept the “very good” Hulu scripted series Furious off the top spot for a while now. “If you compare the cost of Welcome to the Family with the cost of a scripted series such as Furious, I think streamers and buyers are looking closely at the audiences that true-crime stories can bring,” he added.

Curious wants to double down in America and Freedman speaks with Deadline from L.A., which he will visit three to four times per year and says is “really starting to pay off.”

In the offing is another Netflix true crime series for early next year, which Freedman is keeping mum about, and a show about a “story I’ve always liked that people know, but they only know one side of it,” he added, intriguingly.

Freedman’s view on the docs commissioning landscape more generally is “mixed.”

On the one hand, “it’s harder than ever to get greenlights, competition is intense for stories that everyone knows are working, and buyers are making fewer bets each year.”

On the other, “documentaries have never been more popular or attracted such large audiences.”