ZDFneo joins SAM Productions’ Below The Surface

Originally commissioned by Discovery Networks Denmark for Kanal 5, where the series will debut later this spring, the drama will also air on Kanal 5 in Sweden and TV Norge in Norway, and broadcast on Iceland’s RUV. The eight-part crime thriller Below The Surface has been brought to life by a team of leading Scandinavian creatives with Kasper Barfoed as creator, head writer and concept director, alongside Morten Kjems Hytten Juhl who serves as producer.

SAM Productions’ Søren Sveistrup (The Killing), Adam Price (Borgen) and Meta Louise Foldager Sørensen (A Royal Affair) and ZDF editors Frank Seyberth and Wolfgang Feindt serve as executive producers. The series has been selected to feature in the upcoming Berlinale Special Series, with the first two episodes being screened at 3pm on 15 February at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.
 
Dr. Simone Emmelius, Head of ZDFneo, stated: ‘In 2017, ZDFneo will be showcasing its first international co-productions, so extending our fiction portfolio in TV and online is key for us. Therefore, I’m glad that we have found suitable partners in Discovery, SAM and Studiocanal, and am sure that this production will intrigue our young target audience.”
 
Adam Price, SAM Productions added; ‘We are thrilled that our brand new Scandinavian collaboration has brought together a winning partnership between ZDFneo, Discovery and Studiocanal, three leading companies in international television’.
 
Rola Bauer, managing director, Studiocanal, who orchestrated the coproduction strategy with SAM, commented: ‘SAM has brilliantly created a gritty and grounded narrative that touches all of our fears today and we wanted to help find the right copro partner to support SAM and their partner Discovery, so, for us, ZDFneo was such a natural fit and we are thrilled that they saw the relevance of this story’.

‘It was an excellent collaborative effort between SAM's and Studiocanal's teams and I’d like to thank Jonas Bauer, head of international acquisitions and co-productions, Nicolas Loock, CFO TV Series, and Matthias Nitschke, SVP business affairs and legal at Studiocanal, and Nina Bisgaard, Financial Producer at SAM, for securing this important deal’, she concludes.