How Much Does It Cost To Produce Your Favorite TV Show?

As the battle for living room dominance wages between networks and on-demand services, the budgets of your favourite television shows are skyrocketing as each party tries to gain an edge with original, blockbuster-quality programming. How much does it cost to produce an episode of your FAVORITE TV SHOW? So how much Lannister gold goes into an episode of Game of Thrones? Network key НВО Amazon The CW ABC NBC AMC CBS Yahoo! Screen Fox Showtime Netflx History FX BBC Comedy Central ITV The most expensive shows on TV Cost vs return on investment But do high budgets guarantee that the audience will like it? Only when it makes for ground-breaking television, or so the rating figures would suggest. These budgets rely on being able to draw in big audiences and, as a consequence, big advertising revenues. $3.5m - the average cost of an original network TV show in 2015. Advertising cost ($) Cost per episode ($) Sense8 Empire 521,794| Game of Thrones 3 m The Walking Dead 502,500 2.8 m The Big Bang Theory (Monday) 289,621 4 m The Big Bang Theory (Thursday) 5 m 266,163 4 m Once Upon a Time House of Cards Modern Family 4 m Gotham Orange Is The New Black The Big Bang Theory Daredevil 266,163 3.5 m Transparent Arrow The Blacklist The Flash Better Call Saul Modem Family True Detective Breaking Bad Better Call Saul 200,000| Homeland NCIS: New Orleans Hawall Five-0 Emplre 3.5 m American The Walking Dead Horror Story Mad Men The Simpsons The Blacklist The Good wife Orphan Black 180,618 3.5 m 2 m Family Guy/The Americans Communty t'SAlways Sunny Doctor Who/Peaky Blinders O South Park Vikings Once Upon a Time Penny Dreadful sherlock 159,160 4.5 m Downton 1m Abbey Gotham 158.547| 4 m The Simpsons 158,547 | 7.0 7.5 8.0 8.5 9.0 9.5 10 2.5 m Viewer rating (IMDB) Average spend by network 7m Unsurprisingly, the driving force behind production costs are salaries. Number of paid U.S. subscribers (millions) 6 m Because of this, NBC made a loss on the the final series, despite advertisers paying The cast of Friends were paid 5 m 40 Netflix 40 Amazon 30 НВО $1m per episode $473,500 9 4 m in 2002 - or $1.46m in today's money. for a 30-second advertising slot. 3 m 2 m At its height, ER cost $13m per episode - this meant that NBC were essentially making a loss to pay for the show's popularity (blame George Clooney for that one). NBC On Stride To see the sources for this infographic visit: Live URL TBC This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 BY SA International License - www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 FINANCIAL Avg budget per episode НВО Amazon The CW ABC AMC CBS Yahoo! Fox Showtime Netflix History