ITV has announced its bumper spring schedule for 2021 and it’s a real feast of entertainment
You can read the full announcement for yourself, but, if you’re in a hurry, we’ve cherry picked just some of the more interesting items and linked them through to our extensive coverage elsewhere. They’ve broken the content down into four groups: events, drama, entertainment and factual.
Events
What could be bigger than the Euros (The UEFA Euro 2021 Championships — not now the 2020 Championships we note). While we wait news of the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which tend to dominate BBC schedules), this is a sporting delight, at least for football fans. ITV has also counted its new series of Love Island as an event. It’s an interesting taxonomy and blurs the line between entertainment and events in our view.
Drama
This is very much a strength for ITV at present. The picture they’ve chosen (above) is from forthcoming John Simm Brighton based detective drama Grace and we’re currently gripped by the latest (and final we understand) series of Unforgotten. ITV also makes good mention of Viewpoint starring Noel Clarke, Too Close starring Denise Gough and Emily Watson and Innocent starring Katherine Kelly.
Here’s their own take on this year’s drama successes:
It’s been a great start to the year for ITV, We’ve had four out of the top six biggest drama launches of the year, led by The Pembrokeshire Murders. This had an amazing audience of over 12m viewers per episode, across platforms and transmissions over 28 days.
The Bay, Finding Alice, Marcella and most recently McDonald and Dodds and Unforgotten have been highlights for us too, and these shows have helped us secure what is our best start to the year ever, in terms of drama viewing on ITV Hub.
Entertainment
Here they lead with their brand new entertainment shows featuring Ian Wright (Moneyball), Vernon Kay (Game of Talents) and the announcement that Oti Mabuse will be joining the judging panel for The Masked Dancer.
There’s a lot more in the announcement (see link above).
Factual
This is another strong suit for ITV, including factual titles lead by Ross Kemp and Kate Garraway. As they said:
we’ve had some terrific factual shows like Long Lost Family which has achieved its best ratings since 2017, Joanna Lumley’s Home Sweet Home -Travels in My Own Land which is her biggest show for us in five years, and of course Breaking Dad with Bradley and Barney, which opened with nearly 6 million viewers.
There’s plenty more mentioned in the full announcement and we’ll bring you more on key shows through the year.