Shed housing U.S. units

Production house creates umbrella company

By CYNTHIA LITTLETON

'Supernanny'

Emmerson

O’Connell

Shed Media, the U.K. film and TV shingle behind “Supernanny” and “Footballers Wives,” is creating a U.S. umbrella company for its various production and distribution units.

Based in Burbank, Shed Media U.S. will now house the U.S. operations of Richochet Television, producer of ABC’s “Supernanny” and Bravo’s “Real Housewives of New York City." Wall to Wall, which just won the docu Oscar for “Man on Wire”; as well as banners Twenty Twenty, Shed Prods. and Outright Distribution.

Nick Emmerson, who had been exec veep of Richochet, will serve as prexy of Shed Media U.S. Jennifer O’Connell, an NBC alum who joined Richochet in 2007, has been upped to exec veep of Shed Media U.S., which has about 200 employees across its various units.

The goal of the roll-up is to make Stateside buyers more familiar with the Shed moniker rather than doing business under so many different imprints, Emmerson said. One of the company’s selling points is its breadth of experience in unscripted and scripted skeins and feature films.

“In many ways we’ve already been sharing resources and taking pitch meetings together, but we wanted to send a really clear message to buyers and industry as a whole that we are capable of doing any kind of programming,” Emmerson told Daily Variety.

Among other projects, Shed Media U.S. has a reality skein, “World’s Strictest Parents,” based on one of its Brit formats, set to bow on cabler CMT in April. It also has unscripted pilots set up at Bravo and Animal Planet, and a scripted project in the hopper at HBO with “True Blood” scribe Alan Ball attached.

Shed Media U.K.’s Wall to Wall unit was a producer on the “Man on Wire” docu that nabbed the feature docu Oscar on Sunday. The company has just greenlighted a docu from “Man on Wire” helmer James Marsh about an extensive research project on dreams conducted by the U. of California at San Diego (Daily Variety, Feb. 24).