North American scripted TV commissions rose again in 2025, up 3% year over year, with first-run scripted up 7% according to new Ampere Analysis data. That’s now two straight years of growth after the 2022 collapse, even as international scripted output fell 9%. This isn’t a cyclical bounce. It’s a structural divergence between a market that can still fund risk and one that increasingly can’t.
Ampere’s data puts North America at 76% of 2021 output levels, the highest since the late-2022 production pullback. That’s still well below Peak TV highs, but the direction matters more than the absolute number. Buyers are commissioning again because they’ve narrowed their ambitions, tightened their inputs, and accepted a more conservative definition of what counts as a viable scripted bet.
Internationally, the opposite is happening. Western Europe’s pullback is being driven by public broadcaster budget pressure and an accelerated shift toward unscripted. The result is fewer scripted orders overall, with commercial free-to-air broadcasters holding up better than SVoD buyers. That same dynamic is visible in North America, but with a key difference. US commercial broadcasters are expanding, not just contracting more slowly.
Commercial FTA scripted orders in North America rose 22% year over year. That’s the standout number in Ampere’s release, and it explains much of the regional recovery.
Broadcast Is Back Because It Knows What It Is Again
US broadcast networks aren’t suddenly rediscovering creative ambition. They’re rediscovering discipline.
Broadcast execs are commissioning scripted shows that fit known formats, established genres, and proven audience behaviors. That’s allowed them to increase volume while controlling downside risk. It’s also why pre-existing IP now accounts for 44% of all North American scripted commissions, up from 41% in 2024.
Commercial broadcasters are leading that shift. 57% of their scripted orders in 2025 were based on existing IP, the highest share in five years. That’s not nostalgia. It’s a response to a marketplace where marketing costs, audience fragmentation, and discovery friction have permanently changed the economics of launching something new.
For broadcasters, IP-based development simplifies three things at once. It reduces greenlight risk, lowers audience acquisition costs, and shortens the time between order and monetization. In a schedule-driven business with fixed ad commitments, those efficiencies matter more than creative novelty.
SVoD services are also contributing to the rebound, but more selectively. They’re commissioning fewer total titles than during the Peak TV years, but they’re still active where IP, genre reliability, or global portability justifies spend. Pay TV sits somewhere in between, stable but no longer setting the pace.
The Streaming Wars Take
The North American scripted recovery isn’t a vote of confidence in volume. It’s a vote of confidence in constraint.
What’s changed since 2022 isn’t appetite. It’s tolerance for uncertainty. Buyers who can define their audience, predict performance windows, and anchor marketing around known IP are still commissioning. Buyers who can’t are retrenching or shifting to unscripted.
This is why North America is diverging from international markets. US commercial broadcasters and major US-based streaming services still have scale, advertising leverage, and IP libraries that support repeatable commissioning. Public broadcasters in Europe don’t, and their funding models leave less room for downside.
For producers, the implication is blunt. Original concepts without IP, format familiarity, or clear scheduling value are now structurally disadvantaged. The recovery favors companies that control adaptable rights, franchises that can be refreshed cheaply, and development slates built around execution rather than experimentation.
Scripted TV isn’t bouncing back everywhere. It’s consolidating around buyers that know exactly why they’re commissioning and what they expect to get back.
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