Hello Sunshine’s F1 Academy Netflix series

The Client: Reece Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine has a UK unscripted division led by former Channel 4 commissioner Sarah Lazenby. Sarah landed a major high-profile series commission F1 Academy for Netflix and needed to hire a senior creative team to to manage the team of directors and APs, lead the location shoots and oversee the edit. 

The Challenge: The edit process would run concurrently with the shoot, requiring close collaboration between the Showrunner and Series Editor to deliver the series successfully. Meanwhile, the F1 accreditation deadline was rapidly approaching, meaning swift action was required to secure the necessary passes for the team. We needed to find a Showrunner willing to travel to multiple locations on short notice, and as always, Netflix had final approval, so the job was to present candidates who would be approved by the commissioning team. The Thrive team know this market inside out, having placed hundreds of unscripted Executive Producers, Showrunners, and Series Editors over the yeras, but this was an exercise in speed and rigour.

The Result: We hired Lisa Keane, Executive Producer of Amazon Prime’s Serena Williams documentary series as the Showrunner and seasoned edit expert Doran Azouelos with credits including Ant and Dec’s Saturday Nigth Takeaway and The Voice as Series Editor. The series is currently in production and will be airing towards the end of 2024. Sarah Lazenby and Hello Sunshine was delighted with the team, as were Netflix.

Thrive were brilliant. I really valued their transparency, industry intelligence, and investment in the hire. They were so supportive and handled everything for us from the initial interview through to extensive referencing and contract negotiation. We found a brilliant candidate for a really important hire.