IF NOT the largest, it is certainly, as Hagai Levi, the showrunner of HBO’s lead fall series Scenes From a Marriage and Series Mania festival jury president, termed it: “The most important television festival in the world.”

This year’s edition of Series Mania at Lille in northern France previewed 70 series from 22 countries, with 44 new entries as well as three days of talk about the business of global streaming.

The most dominant trend in new series is that the best of them, Germinal (France), The Unusual Suspects (Australia) and The Last Socialist Artifact (Croatia), feature plots pitting rich against poor and acknowledging this inequality.

This comes in the wake of US satire The White Lotus’s critique of the rich and the Covid more unequal distribution of wealth with tech billionaires growing by leaps and bounds while millions are about to be thrown out of their homes.

On the other hand in the US series The Bite and On The Verge, there is an utter ignoring of these disparities, continuing to pretend they don’t exist, or a Hollywoodisation of the differences (Hacks) or a deflecting of group anti-corporate sentiments into individualised domestic problems as in the French series The Code.

The mood in the three days of consideration of the streaming and on-the-air television business was relentlessly positive and why not? The US streamers are flush with money, though much of it borrowed, as the Disney+ rep began his talk by displaying the figure of 116 million subscribers as of August of this year and with the US cable channel Starz, CBS Viacom, and HBO Max all about to expand into Europe, a territory they can’t wait to pillage.

The European mood was, despite the edict, much more cautious on how to take advantage of, counter and contend with this onslaught.

There was little talk about Asia — have the streamers conceded this territory to China? — though a report by the French State Film and Television Association, the CNC, revealed that over the last year China was the leading commissioner of series, beating the US by 653 to 611, with France, Britain and Turkey far behind.

The US streamers’ global capacity has forced changes in the European media ecosystem, prompting a new wave of consolidation like the coming merger of France’s two leading independent TV channels TF1 and M6 and much more co-operation between public and private national entities and between nations.

Germinal, an update of Zola’s novel about a miners’ strike, with a budget of €1.7 million for each of its Euro standard six episodes, voted the most popular series of the festival, is a combination of the French production company Banijay, France public television, Italian public television RAI and the new French streaming service Salto.

These combinations are now necessary to produce competitive series since the US streamers, led by HBO — now folded into HBO Max with series such as Game of Thrones and Westworld — have pushed budgets to £3.5m per episode, as a way of drowning their rivals in high-priced production values.

Cross-country financing is now also de rigueur with, as one speaker put it, even the days of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 combined financing barely being enough to compete with the new budget requirements.

The expansion plans of the US streamers for Europe often betray the one-sidedness of the transaction. Netflix is beginning production in Russia with its contemporary version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Anna K, and the Netflix rep expressed surprise that the country “has the technicians, the studios and the landscapes” to produce the series, amased at “discovering” that Russia, the land of Eisenstein, Sokurov and Konchalovsky, actually has a long and celebrated moving-image history.

Russian television also is alive and well and one of the surprise hits of the festival was Vampires of the Midland, about a vampire family with a feisty grandpa who harkened back fondly to the Stalinist 1950s and his young bumbling tech savvy charge in a smart update on Anne Rice’s Interview with The Vampire which collapsed Russian history, including the defeat of Napoleon, into bite-sized (pun intended) chunks.

The series though has a warmth and comradeship to it, sometimes expressed in cynical Russian humour, with the vampire family committed to not killing humans, that was missing from Rice’s simply decadent storytelling.

As the Russians move into straight genre productions, here and in the action flick Major Grom: Plague Doctor, they produce them with a liveliness and good-natured humour missing from the more intense pursuit of novelty in US genre production.

Part II, next week, will consider the best and worst of the 70 series at the festival, all of which will be making their way to home screens and computers this fall.