Negotiating Creativity on a Small Budget: Creative Assumptions in DR3’s TV Commissioning

This article presents findings from a production analysis of the Danish public-service television channel DR3’s fiction production Anton 90, which was made in cooperation with a small independent production company called New Creations. In the context of intensified competition on the Danish market for fiction series, the ambivalent cooperation behind this production exemplifies the low-budget efforts of a traditional public service institution to produce the fiction series that their younger target audience desires. The article uses a narrative-discursive approach to creativity and develops the term creative assumptions in order to analyse how media professionals’ implicit assumptions about conditions for creativity can influence the production process, and can generate disagreements. The analysis shows that the value of Anton 90 as a product is negotiated socially by the involved parties who have quite different assumptions about how production conditions can promote creativity, and suggests that a low-budget production can still be labelled as “successful”.