Cannes, April 2023

The Sea Beyond (Mare Fuori) is an Italian phenomenal series ready to be spread all around the world… come to its third season on the Italian national channel Rai 1 and with its first two seasons out on Netflix and the fourth season ready start shooting next week, The Sea Beyond is prepared to take new paths off the small screen.

Long story short, The Sea Beyond‘s first season, follows two teenagers in Naples. Filippo (Nicolas Maupas) dreams of becoming a musician, and Carmine (Massimiliano Caiazzo) of becoming a hairdresser. Filippo comes from a well-off family from the North and has dreams of becoming a musician. Carmine, from a Camorra family, wants to become a famous hairdresser instead of taking up the family business. Both have committed serious crimes, and their dreams are cut short as their freedom is taken away. Will they be strong enough to oppose the attacks from fellow detainee Ciro (Giacomo Giorgio, The Happy Prince ) the young, up-and-coming crime boss? What chances are there for young love, as Filippo falls for female inmate Naditza (Valentina Romani)? Though the prison’s director Paola (Carolina Crescentini) and correctional officer Massimo (Carmine Recano) still try hard to help these “flawed” kids, the boys and girls behind bars are often left to fend for themselves. What they share though is a beautiful view over the sea promising a future in which their dreams may come true, the same sea that, as Giacomo Giorgio recently pointed out, an actor can donate with his work to a viewer in need looking for something to help him going through a bad day.

Obviously, there is so much more about this series, set in the Naples juvenile detention centre; and it’s the extraordinary mix of what’s behind every character’s demeanour and their story before their detention that makes The Sea Beyond a series succeeding in the very difficult and almost impossible task of uniting entire generations of viewers, there’s literally nobody between 12 and 35 who hasn’t watched it, 220 million views, but with the streaming on Netflix and on the Italian platform RaiPlay number changes hour by hour.

Is producer Roberto Sessa to talk about the extraordinary numbers of the series: “Good morning, and thank you very much for coming. I think this chart on the screen shows that The Sea Beyond is a cultural phenomenon now in Italy. The fascinating thing, in my opinion, is that we succeeded in all the different platforms on which we have been aired in Italy. Season three started on the national channel Rai 1, which is the free road platform on the 1st of February this year. Basically, the 220 million views you read on the chart are all the viewers through the three seasons, but the third season alone, from the 1st of February until the end of February, got 105 million viewers on RaiPlay. At the same time, the first two seasons were aired on Netflix. Season three will be on Netflix from September 2023. Since September 2022, the show has been in the top 10 list on Netflix for more than 30 weeks. Just to give you a comparison, usually in Italy when a show is really successful, it stays in the top 10 for about six/seven weeks. Here we are talking about 30. What we have achieved is that we got three to four points above the average of the channel and the incredible thing is that, while on RaiPlay 75% of the audience was under 35 years old and 50% under 25; on national television the average was 53 years old. So this is just to say that there is a combination of possibilities for the viewers to appreciate this show. And this is really something that we should try to investigate, you know, in my opinion, it’s something quite interesting for the Rai industry. This is an example of something that can lead to new possibilities in order to achieve an international audience.”

But what about the future of The Sea Beyond?

“We are now getting ready for season four. We started to talk with Rai about seasons five and six. But we are thinking about a musical too and about a movie as a spinoff. I mean, it is really becoming something quite extraordinary. And, you know, we are looking forward to seeing the result of this series in the international market. I know that thanks to Beta Film the series is making its way through international distribution. We had a few conversations regarding the possibility of making adaptations in a number of countries. So, you know, this is The Sea Beyond. Thank you very much and enjoy the episode are going to show you, the first episode of season three.”

With Matteo Paolillo (Edoardo in the series) releasing his first album ( the songs the characters sing in the series and the opening theme are from his pen) on May 19th, and most of the cast hosted, from north to south of Italy in schools, festivals, book fairies,… the wave of The Sea Beyond gets higher and higher and has no intention of stopping.