Penelope creator Mark Duplass went about getting the eight-episode drama made in a way that’s nearly unheard of.
One of Netflix’s latest is a show called Penelope, which centers around a teenage girl, played by Megan Stott. The title character, who doesn’t feel at all at home in modern-day culture, escapes to a simpler life in the wilderness.
Mark Duplass on Penelope’s Uncommon Development and Season 2 Prospects
Mark Duplass, co-creator of the new series Penelope, now streaming on Netflix, guested on Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town. During his interview, Duplass went into detail about exactly how Penelope got made.
In short: The series was self-financed. The longer version of the story is that Duplass, who has multitudes of experience in the world of independent film, found himself with an idea for a series that, for all intents and purposes, might’ve been tough to get off the ground through traditional means.
Self-financing, wherein the filmmaker comes up with the money to get a project made themselves, is quite common in cinema (or it used to be, 20 years ago) but is very much rare as it pertains to television series.
So, Mark Duplass got the funds together to produce Penelope and cannily sold the program’s distribution rights to Netflix for a two-year window. This means that Penelope is not a Netflix original and Duplass and his producing partner Mel Eslyn, own the rights to the show.
In turn, that grants Duplass a number of unusual benefits: He owns the rights for Penelope everywhere but in the United States, including the Video On-Demand rights, as he explained to The Hollywood Reporter in May.
Additionally, while Season 2 of Penelope has not yet been green-lit, Duplass is playing a game of wait-and-see with regard to the show’s Netflix popularity, which will, in turn, inform a possible second season’s shape and scope:
"Ideally, we see how we do on Netflix. In the event that it’s a blowout success, you might see a bigger scope for Season 2. In the event that it’s a moderate success, we might write it for a smaller scope, but at least we’re in the driver’s seat now as to whether we get to keep making this show."
Mark Duplass also sat down with Indiewire where he discussed not only what releasing the show on Netflix brings to the table, namely its algorithm which it uses to suggest content to users:
"There’s a lot of discussion about the Netflix algorithm, y’know? And, of course, as we know, nothing is empirically bad or empirically good. But for a show like ‘Penelope’, that is a relatively small show that… I don’t even think it’s responsible for if someone came up to me and said ‘We’re gonna make this our flagship show, we should be promoting the shit out of it."
He continued, expanding on his remarks about Netflix’s algorithm and how it bolstered his confidence about Penelope attracting an audience. But he was also acutely aware of the fact that if the series lost money for its distributor, it results in "a smaller chance to break out in Season 2:"
"I would be worried they would lose money on it, it gives us a smaller chance to break out in Season 2 if it doesn’t hit. The one place in town you can trust the cream rising to the top without promotion is Netflix, because of that algorithm. So, I actually felt most confident dropping this thing on Netflix. Y’know, we’re doing it just U.S. only and we retain the rights for the rest of the world. And the hope is that if it hits here, then I can then take it around and sell it piece-by-piece around the world."
Duplass believes the series is "un-cancellable" because he owns the series outright and thus he’s "the boss." If a distributor for Penelope doesn’t want to do a Season 2, the executive producer seems quite sure he’ll be able to shop the show around and find someone who will:
"And not to get too into the weeds again with the business but that, essentially makes our show un-cancellable, ‘cause I won’t have just one primary boss who owns everything. I will be the boss and I will have 10 places that wanna distribute it. And let’s say seven of them only wanna come back next year and do another season, great! I’ll just do it with those and I’ll find other buyers around. It’s a lot more work but I think it’s worth it."
It all feels like an incredibly savvy play on the part of Mark Duplass. While it’s still too early to tell if this venture will pay off - as Penelope just arrived on Netflix on Tuesday, September 24 - the series did hit #8 on Netflix's Top 10 TV Shows charts in the U.S. on September 28, a promising sign that audiences are checking out the show en masse.
If the show lingers in the Top 10 over the week or two, then fans can become much more confident that Duplass and co. will move forward with a Season 2.
All eight episodes of Penelope Season 1 are now streaming on Netflix.
