While many networks are seeing diminished ratings these days, SundanceTV is bucking the trend.

According to president Charlie Collier, Sundance is one of the fastest growing networks two years in a row. The network has gained in both prime and total daily viewers, with its distribution up 10 percent year over year.

Collier attributes the success to working with big-name talent that elevates the work and attracts eyeballs, a trend that continued in the network’s announcements on Saturday at the Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles.

First up: Riviera, a stylish thriller starring Julia Stiles and Anthony LaPaglia, will debut September 14 on Sundance Now. The network hopes to continue to differentiate Sundance Now as not just a streaming version of SundanceTV, but as a service with its own original programming.

CBC and SundanceTV greenlit a new eight-part drama miniseries Unspeakable, created by Robert C. Cooper (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency) about the tainted blood scandal in Canada in the early 1980s.

Based on two nonfiction books and the emergence of HIV and Hepatitis C in the 80s, the series also comes from a personal place, as Cooper himself contracted Hepatitis C from tainted blood.

While Unspeakable will be filmed in early 2018, the next wave of Sundance TV’s programming arrives much sooner with the return of Top of the Lake on September 10.

Following its acclaimed premiere at Cannes, Top of the Lake: China Girl brings back Elisabeth Moss as Detective Robin Griffin, and adds powerhouses Nicole Kidman, Gwendoline Christie and Alice Englert to the ensemble for the second go-round from Academy Award-nominee Jane Campion.

“The first one was about the wilderness outside. China Girl is about the wilderness within,” said Moss.

China Girl premieres Sunday, September 10 at 9p/8c, kicking off a three-night special event running through September 11 and 12 that will unveil two hours of the si- hour story each night, with an encore presentation immediately following.

The show’s female creator and predominantly female cast displays the growing trend of diversity in TV, but “there’s obviously still work to be done and it has to be pushed in that direction. We keep making obvious strides, of course. When you look at the landscape in TV, and how much content is led by women, it’s exactly where we should be going. That’s what the audience wants to see,” said Moss. “The people with the purse strings have finally started to realize they make money and people want to watch them, with Wonder Woman being the most obvious recent example.”

“For both TV shows I’ve been on, I’m up here sitting with women. That means that the roles are here,” said Kidman. “The roles are in television. That’s really exciting. As an actor, you go where the great roles are. I love being a Jane Campion woman. There’s a truth to it. It’s not a presentation. It’s a female. There’s no judgment.”

Campion’s open-mindedness about her characters is key to the series, given the focused lens it puts on serious and sensitive topics such as rape, sex trafficking and class.

“Jane doesn’t judge any of her characters. She’s very nonjudgmental and generous in spirit. She portrays these different situations, different choices, in a way that is nonjudgmental. She sheds light on these different facets that are very ugly and horrific at times,” said Moss. “These are things we don’t discuss as often as we should. We tend to brush them under the rug sometimes. It’s important that we shed some light on these subjects.”

SundanceTV’s September continues with the psychological thriller Liar, starring Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey) and Ioan Gruffudd (Forever) from the creators of The Missing, Harry and Jack Williams.

The series premieres Wednesday, September 27 at 10/9c, and the secrets and lies between the two enigmatic characters will flow from there.

“We explore the idea of lies and what a lie means. There are such things as good lies. There are lies to defend people. It’s a very gray area. Playing with the idea of a lie and the audience’s perception of that, we’re not quite sure where we stand between these two characters,” said Harry Williams. “That’s the endgame we had in mind when coming up with the show.”

It also feels all too real considering the political landscape.

“The most complex of situations can be boiled to my word against yours. Objective truth is harder to come by. The proliferation of different points of view only makes it harder. One person could say one thing, one can say the other. What do you do with it?” said Harry Williams.

While there’s ambiguity baked in the show on who’s lying and who’s not, viewers can expect closure.

“The beauty of our show is there’s a beginning, middle and a satisfying end. There’s no open-ended mystery. This is a show you can binge watch in one weekend, or a show you won’t be able to wait for the next episode the following week,” said Gruffudd.

But, of course, never say never about another season.

“There’s always a tomorrow for every story. There could be one, or there could not be one, but we don’t want to hold hostage the season. We let it all out there as full as we can,” said Harry Williams.

There’s no ambiguity in SundanceTV’s Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, a docuseries from Academy Award-nominee Joe Berlinger based on the infamous murders central to Truman Capote’s classic novel In Cold Blood.

The series will air as a two-night special event on Saturday, November 18, and Sunday, November 19 at 9p/8c. Cold Blooded headlines a “True Crime Marathon” weekend for the network, featuring the In Cold Blood film for its 50th anniversary, as well as Murder in the First, Infamous Summer of Sam, Bonnie and Clyde, Zodiac and more.

“I thought it’d be a great opportunity to tell this story now, [because] this was the granddaddy of true crime stories that launched the state of storytelling with regard to true crime that we have today,” said Berlinger. “This is the precipitating story that launched where we are today, good or bad.”

The four-hour docuseries reexamines the crime with never-before-seen details springing from unprecedented access to original documents, audio recordings, photographs and memoirs and letters from the murderers and their families.

Berlinger compares the series to O.J.: Made in America, in that they can pull back and give context.

“We’re not re-investigating or presenting whole new theory. But it’s the first time anyone has pulled back, really focused on what the family was like, humanizing them, how did the investigation unfold, and a little bit on how the reality differs from the book,” said Berlinger. “Setting the scene and telling the story, even if familiar, tells the story in a very comprehensive way. We try to contextualize things that we wouldn’t have thought to contextualize if this had been 25 years ago.”

[All images courtesy of SundanceTV]

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