Photo courtesy: Walter Presents

PBS’ PBS Distribution unit recently struck a deal with British streaming service Walter Presents, which last year launched in the U.S. as an SVOD product, to add more than 300 hours of international drama series to its PBS Masterpiece channel on Amazon’s Prime Video Channels.

Started in January 2016 as a co-venture between Britain’s Channel 4, which owns a majority stake in it, and Global Series Network, Walter Presents will provide award-winning, top rated, exclusive and original first-run drama series from 12 countries, including Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Norway and the Netherlands, to U.S. audiences with an appetite for quality TV content.

Walter Presents founder and curator Walter Iuzzolino. Photo courtesy of Walter Presents

Walter Presents, from founder, curator and former commissioner and programming executive Walter Iuzzolino, will bring drama series from around the world such as Spin, billed as the French House of Cards, Danish noir Norskov, which focuses on a cop who returns to his hometown to help clean up its drug problem and Belgian crime thriller 13 Commandments, which follows the investigation of a series of crimes based on the Ten Commandments and Belgium’s Professor T, about an eccentric professor and criminologist who serves as an advisor to the police to America via streaming on the Masterpiece channel.

A number of select Walter Presents titles will then be chosen by PBS to air on PBS stations and streaming on PBS Passport, a digital member benefit available through local stations. The first such offering available for broadcast on PBS stations beginning in February is MODUS.

Adapted by Emmy award-winning screenwriters Mai Brostrom and Peter Thorsboe, from the book by Anne Holt, MODUS follows psychologist and ex-FBI profiler Inger Johanne Vik as she finds herself and her autistic daughter, Stina, drawn into an investigation surrounding a series of disturbing and brutal deaths in Stockholm. Working with local detective Ingvar Nyman to find the culprit, a pattern becomes evident as the number of murders increase. In Swedish with English subtitles.

Already a leader in providing quality British drama, PBS will now be able with this partnership to showcase equally as brilliant global drama that features the best the world has to offer. Look for MODUS on PBS stations nationwide beginning in February.