Yorkshire-based Duck Soup Films will be winding down active development and production activity, starting next year.

Launched in 2015, the banner most recently produced a teen drama series called Dreamers (pictured) that premiered on Channel 4 earlier this year. Commissioned in 2022, the live-action series (six x 30 minutes) follows a group of young aspiring dance students dealing with coming-of-age pressures. Notably, Dreamers was among the many projects that benefited from the UK government’s now-defunct Young Audiences Content Fund.

Duck Soup will continue to manage and oversee its existing slate—which also includes acclaimed LGBTQ+ drama Lost Boys & Fairies, which recently scored five BAFTA Cymru wins.

Founders Libby Durdy, Jessica Brown-Meek and Rebekah Wray-Rogers released a statement explaining that the decision to shut down was driven by the continued strain in the UK TV market—which has forced some of the nation’s most prominent kids content buyers to pull back or close down entirely in recent months.

“Maintaining an indie focused on bold, authored content in today’s climate is increasingly untenable for a small company like ours. We simply don’t have the resources to sustain our work as producers developing in-house at the level we aspire to, and the market will no longer support it.”