The Garden has made a trio of senior promotions as it prepares to co-produce series two of Squid Game: the Challenge and expand into new areas.
Lucie Duxbury has become the ITV Studios label’s head of programmes, having been a staff executive producer on 24 Hours in A&E, Emergency and Alone.
She has been acting head of programmes, covering part of creative director Nic Brown’s duties while the senior exec was on maternity leave. Brown has now returned and Duxbury will report into her.
Also promoted is Spencer Kelly, the lead executive on Emergency and an exec on 24 Hours in A&E. As head of factual, his brief will include landing large-scale projects.
Meanwhile, Jermaine Blaike, series director on 24 Hours in Police Custody, takes on a staff role as executive producer.
Expanding on the roles in an interview with Deadline, chief executive John Hay said the rejig of the senior team reflects that it is “evolving from being a company best known for domestic fixed-rig shows to being a company that still has fixed-rig at its heart but is taking something we’ve learned from that and applying it across a wider range of genres.”
As well as co-producing the Squid Game physical game show for Netflix, The Garden recently produced the BBC documentary Our Falklands War and has another feature-length single in the works on the miners’ strike.
Hay said the company had also secured two further commissions from streamers. Though he did not reveal details, he said that premium unscripted is reaching big audiences and expected The Garden would pitch for further co-productions of scale.
“I expect half of the producers in the world were talking to Netflix about adapting Squid Game,“ he told Deadline.
“There was a sense of creative cross-pollination, about what might spark creatively if you put people coming from different directions into the same conversation. We have plenty of experience with shows about characters under pressure, whether that’s having a major accident or being in a police interview room or trying to scratch a shape from a cookie.”
Its higher-volume fixed-rig returners will, however, remain core to The Garden, with Hay highlighting their importance as “talent incubators” for freelance crew.
