This month we premiered our brand new pan-European crime drama, The Last Panthers, on Sky Atlantic. It was the first show that I greenlit for the channel and I’m both immensely proud and hugely excited at what has been created. 

Following in the footsteps of Fortitude, Sky Atlantic’s most successful commission to date, The Last Panthers reaffirms our commitment to invest in ambitious, high quality, original drama. 

Filmed across Europe, in London, Marseille, Montenegro and Belgrade, it’s a multi-lingual series that opens with a gripping diamond heist, before exploring the shadowy lives of gangsters and ‘banksters’. 

I’m really pleased that our customers are enjoying it as much we do. Following a build-up of positive reviews and critical acclaim, an average audience of more than 700,000 UK viewers have now watched the first episode. We know that they’re also enjoying the flexibility of watching the series when and where they want. The first episode had been downloaded nearly 100,000 times before it even went on air, as customers took advantage of our on demand service. Others have been watching through NOW TV, as well as on the move, via Sky Go.   

The show was also broadcast simultaneously to Sky’s other territories across Europe - Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria. 

It will be enjoyed in more and more countries as Sky Vision, our distribution arm, works with StudioCanal to sell it around the world. We are right at the start of that process and it’s already been picked up by major channels in the US, Australia, Scandinavia, Iceland and Israel among others. Fortitude went on to be sold to over 100 countries around the world.

However, success for an individual show like The Last Panthers isn’t based purely on audience figures. It comes from a combination of things. 

First and foremost is making sure our customers feel that they are getting value for their subscription and love our programming. We already know that our customers’ favourite entertainment genre is drama, and my ambition is for The Last Panthers to be one of their top picks.

We also want programmes that get talked about and receive critical acclaim, which The Last Panthers has had in abundance. The Telegraph describes it as “TV drama that feels like a cult crime film”, The Times calls it “hugely ambitious” and Boyd Hilton at Heat feels it’s a “truly cinematic crime drama”.

Success is also about making the biggest creative impact, so that more of the best content creators and talent want to work with us in future. For this series, we were incredibly lucky to work with a stellar, international cast, including Oscar nominee Samantha Morton, Croatian star Goran Bogdan, A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim and acting legend Sir John Hurt. Off screen, the show benefits from scripts written by the genius that is Jack Thorne and direction from the brilliant Johan Renck. 

The opening credits for the series even featured a brand new song written by the one and only David Bowie! 

We’re really proud of what The Last Panthers has achieved so far, but we’ve also got a lot more great new shows to look forward to. 

Next year on Sky Atlantic we’ll see the return of two of our most popular original dramas; the second series of Fortitude, our most successful original commission to date, as well as critically acclaimed drama The Tunnel: Sabotage, starring Emmy Award winning Stephen Dillane and the fantastic Clémence Poésy. And the original drama doesn’t stop there - over on Sky 1 you’ll see the launch of Stan Lee’s ‘Lucky Man’ and Harlan Coben’s ‘The Five’ in 2016. 

It’s an exciting time at Sky, with a wealth of high quality dramas on the horizon. I honestly can’t wait to see what’s next.