Self-financing is an anomaly in TV, which doesn’t have the same infrastructure to support independent production as film.
But in the case of 2024’s Penelope, it was the only option that allowed creators Mark Duplass and Mel Eslyn the freedom to make the unprecedented work they envisioned.
As Duplass explained in interviews, when they pitched the half-hour drama about a girl who runs away from an apparently normal 16-year-old life to tough out a Thoreauvian existence in Cascade National Forest, the response from many execs was: “This is beautiful and unique and poetic, and are you crazy, we can’t make it unless there’s a murder in the first 30 seconds!” Which pretty much sums up the current streaming marketplace.
Happily, the indie-cinema veterans had the means to produce the series—a lyric…
المصدر: time
