Around the World in 80 Days

The most-watched thing the European Alliance has made: an eight-part Jules Verne adaptation for BBC One, France 2, ZDF and Rai, launched at Cannes Series in October 2021 and seen by three and a half million people in France and nearly nine million on ZDF's player. Ashley Pharoah and Caleb Ranson wrote it; Steve Barron directed the opening episodes.

David Tennant plays Phileas Fogg as a man whose composure is a coping strategy rather than an inheritance — a reading that gives the wager some weight — with Ibrahim Koma as Passepartout and Leonie Benesch, two years before The Teachers' Lounge, as the journalist Abigail Fix. The trio format is the adaptation's main departure from Verne, and it works: three people with incompatible reasons for being on the same train, filmed across South Africa, Romania and the studios at Bucharest with the budget visible on screen.

Critics were generous — 82% on Rotten Tomatoes — and the audience numbers made it the Alliance's proof of concept, the argument that European public broadcasters pooling money can produce something with the scale of an American streamer's Sunday-night show. It is also, unfashionably, a family adventure series made without irony, and the best case in the catalogue for what that still looks like when the money and the cast are serious.