Mark Duplass Is Betting Streamers Need Indie TV

The new Netflix series “Penelope,” about a 16 year-old girl (Megan Stott) so desperate to unplug from social media that she runs away to live in the forest, is not unlike the other television series created by Duplass Brothers Productions. Written and produced by Mark Duplass, the series is in line with other shows he produced with his brother Jay like “Togetherness,” “Somebody Somewhere,” and “Room 104.” It’s TV work that reflects their indie filmmaking sensibility both as storytellers and finding ways to keep productions cheap.

“I have been able to carve out a little niche for myself,” said Mark Duplass when he was a guest on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast. “If I make things at a certain budget level, keep them cheaply enough, I can get people to give me money. They look at us like a little lottery ticket. If it blows up, great. If not, it’ll bring in some good viewers, it’s going to be well-reviewed. Everybody wins.”

The Duplass Brothers were among the first indie filmmakers, along with Joey Soloway (“Transparent”) and Lena Dunham (“Girls”) who saw the shifting media landscape as an opportunity.

“Us coming to TV in the first place was a calculated move on our part because back in the day, it used to be you make a movie at Sundance, you graduate from Sundance, then Fox Searchlight and Focus Features comes to get you,” said Duplass. “That business dried up [and] I saw a lot of my filmmaking peers just banging their head against that wall that they thought was the place they belonged and really frustrating themselves. And I looked over and TV wanted us there. And so we went there and we found a really great home.”

The idea for “Penelope” came to him while watching the survival reality show “Alone” with his kids during the pandemic. He assumed the relatively inexpensive show (at least by TV’s $3 million an episode standard) would be an easy sell.

“[It’s] a little bit more slower paced, and a little bit more meditative, but it’s still was a YA show, an adventure show in a lot of ways, and I really thought when I brought all eight scripts out that I wrote on spec, that there was going to be a bidding war,” said Duplass. “Everybody passed, and that was an ego hit for me, for sure… I thought I was past this point in my career, and I thought I had earned the right to be able to do something like this.”

Duplass did receive notes like, “maybe if Penelope was able to talk to animals.” Duplass was surprised to hear the feedback from people who were already familiar with his well-established mode of low-cost, low-risk projects. As Duplass spoke with other creators, he realized it wasn’t just him, nor “Penelope” as a project: Something fundamental had changed in the TV business.

“When the pandemic hit, and everything shut down, I think that [the business and the streamers] started to take stock,” said Duplass. “They realized, ‘Oh my God, we need to make a shift. This is not a sustainable model.’ And ‘Penelope’ was really the first time where I felt [that].”

This wasn’t his first foray into self financing. In 2014 the Duplasses made “The One I Love” for approximately $100,000 and took it to Sundance, where it sold to The Weinstein Company for a healthy profit. They also picked up the tab on the first episode of the animated “Animals” before HBO stepped in to cash flow the entire series. But self-financing an eight-episode season of “Penelope” was a substantially larger investment and an even bigger risk: There’s no established market for independently produced TV.

“This is when I really had to circle up with [“Penelope” co-writer and director] Mel [Eslyn], who runs our company and Jay, and say, ‘Are we willing to risk our shirts and self-finance this thing?” said Duplass. “I waffled on it for a little bit. We thought about bringing in some independent financial partners, but ultimately I just felt strongly I wanted to triple down on our values and really go for it. That was to protect it creatively, because I wanted us to be able to do exactly how we wanted to do it, but also there’s a part of me that loves the gamesmanship of this business and I kind of wanted to gamble.”

Duplass’ indie TV gamble didn’t stop there. Two months after premiering “Penelope” at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Duplass Bros. brought four more independently financed pilots to SXSW. Duplass directed a music docseries that he described as being in the vein of “How to with John Wilson,” and he backed “The Broadcast” by creative clown creators Coco Pauroso and Natalie Palamides.

“I call is a post-apocalyptic ‘Broad City,’” Duplass said. “It’s a show about the last remaining broadcast, and it’s just the balls-out clown comedy. It’s so fun for me because I don’t know how to do that well, but what I do know is how to build [Pauroso and Palamides] a ship where we make it for the right price. We give them full creative control and hopefully we take it out and sell it.”

All that indie TV investment emptied the Duplass Bros. coffers, with Mark using portions of his “Morning Show” acting paychecks to cover costs. The investment is slowly paying off with the recent announcement of their TV adaptation of “The Creep Tapes” striking a deal with AMC+ and Shudder and “Penelope” hitting Netflix.

“I would like to see a whole ecosystem spring up around this idea of the streamers are reducing the interesting television that they’re making,” said Duplass. “They know that it can work – hence ‘Baby Reindeer’ sweeping the Emmys in the Limited [Series] category, with no stars and really interesting, small-budgeted storytelling – but their development system is just not built for that. They almost can’t get out of the straitjacket.”

Duplass called the “interesting middle” of television “an endangered species” in 2024, a development he is betting will create a market for indie TV and shows like “Penelope.”

“I think it could be like a whole fun thing where there are TV festivals springing up everywhere,” said Duplass. “Just like an ecosystem for indie film [that] was birthed in the ‘90s, we could see that here for TV.”

Duplass believes there are already great indie TV festivals like SeriesFest in Denver and ATX in Austin, but they currently lack buyers seeking product. The hope is studios will adjust much as they did during the ’90s indie film boom that filled the void after Hollywood stopped making films for adults in the ’80s.

“There’s one thing I consistently hear from people — whether they’re the buyers when I’m bringing them things, or whether they’re my friends in this industry, watching me do it with bated breath to see if they want to jump in —  it’s, ‘I think you are a year too early,’” said Duplass. “Basically, everyone’s going to turn around next year and say, ‘We stopped making things, we stopped buying things, Oh my God, we have no content.’” And I’m kind of banking on that because I financed these myself, I can hold them and I can wait until the right buyer comes along.”

He knows demand won’t be enough. TV executives are currently tasked with developing shows, not acquiring them. For a true indie TV market to develop, that needs to change.

“When indie films started coming out, the development executives didn’t want to go buy those because it meant that their job was obsolete,” said Duplass. “Once they realize they’re just as valuable to [Netflix co-CEO] Ted Sarandos and [HBO and Max chairman] Casey Bloys if they bought it off the street at SeriesFest or ATX, or if they developed it internally, it doesn’t matter, you got it into their hands, and you got it on the channel. Once that’s validated, I think that’s going to be the linchpin.”

After “Penelope” premiered at Sundance, it took five months before Duplass signed the U.S. streaming deal with Netflix. He said they received a wide range of offers from various streamers, but chose Netflix for what he described as being a low-risk and mutually beneficial deal. It allowed him retain ownership and rights to other territories while utilizing the Netflix platform to learn about the audience potential of “Penelope.”

“The one place in town you can trust the cream rising to the top is Netflix because of that algorithm,” said Duplass. “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. That essentially makes our show uncancellable because I won’t have just one primary boss who owns everything.”

To watch the full Toolkit conversation with Duplass, see the video at the top of the page. You can also subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

“Penelope” is now streaming on Netflix.