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‘At Home With The Furys’ Producer Hires Talent-Led Programming Boss

At Home with the Furys producer Optomen has created a Head Of Talent-led Programming role to lead on new docs and reality shows for the UK and U.S. Becky Cadman joins from fellow All3Media stablemate Lime Pictures, which she recently left after the indie closed its London base. Cadman will focus on creating new, premium, talent-driven documentaries and reality shows for the UK and U.S. markets. At Lime she worked across the likes of Vinnie Jones in the Country for Discovery+and her Channel 4 credits included Caroline Flack: Her Life and Death. Optomen has had a number of big hits lately including Netflix’s At Home with the Furys and the BBC’s Sort Your Life Out. Bosses Tina Flintoff and Nick Hornby said: “Talent-led programming has become increasingly important to our business so we are...

The Concord episode of Prime Video's Secret Level showed the hidden potential of the ill-fated hero shooter, and it hinted at what could have been for the video game. Secret Level adapted 15 video games, both old and new, to television, but not all of them were absolute icons of the industry. One game in particular - Concord - was an objective failure, and it was a bit surprising to see it in Secret Level. Even though the game was a failure, Secret Level actually ended up enhancing Concord and showing off the game's true potential.

Concord was a hero shooter game, meaning players controlled specific characters that had their own set of abilities and powers. Like Overwatch 2 or Marvel Rivals, players would have formed teams based around each character's abilities, and they would fight against similarly structured enemy teams. Unfortunately, Concord also didn't do enough to differentiate itself from other hero shooters,...

The aims of the animated anthology Secret Level, whose 15 shorts are based on video and tabletop games, are clear enough: As production company Blur Studio puts it on their website, “Secret Level is our love letter to gaming.” But despite the tangible earnestness of that claim, the series fails to shake off the cynicism of its commercial function and blinkered politics. Beneath flashes of beauty and fits of inspiration lies an elaborate branding exercise.

Secret Level features a handful of shorts that conjure impressive moods. The bleak industrial landscapes in “Armored Core: Asset Management” all but subsume the episode’s protagonist (Keanu Reeves)—and the formidable mech he pilots—conveying the extent of his alienation and the stakes of his mission; the economical “Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know No Fear” spares us unnecessary dialogue, setting its space marines loose with sweltering kineticism; and the martial arts revenge tale of...