New Patterns in Global Television Formats

Introduction

A Changing Format Mosaic

Karina Aveyard, Pia Majbritt Jensen and Albert Moran

Phone a friend and tell them that you are interested in TV formats! There is likely to be reserve, puzzlement, polite silence until you offer examples of formats that they may know. Maybe The Batchelor, The X Factor or The Voice? Of course! says the friend. We are on the same wavelength – or are we?

This kind of move – to illustrate by example rather than explain by definition – reminds us that formats are familiar, everyday, widely understood and shared entities even if their label is a little obscure. But the fact remains that the ubiquity of TV formats is overwhelmingly familiar and continuous, helping to construct public narrative, celebrity and consumer culture from one end of the global television world to the other. TV formats are the driving force that mould together media companies, producers, television industries, performers, stars, executives, distributors, advertisers, merchandisers, audiences, fans and so on into a single, multifarious communion. Being a realm of circulation and mobility, TV formats have little need for definition or explanation so far as this public world is concerned.

Even so, there is a need to push back against this familiarity to bring a more critical light to bear on the phenomenon and meaning of formats. What is a format? Where has the practice of format adaptation come from? When did this happen? Why has it come about and how does it continue? These general questions provide the framework and motivation for the chapters that are collected in this volume. None of the answers are simple or stand-alone, but are instead part of a critical discourse having to do with media and communications in the present. Still, the what question does warrant an answer of sorts, not least to kick-start our volume.

What, then, is a television format? This commodity can be understood as an interconnected parcel of particular knowledges that are activated in the production, financing, marketing, broadcasting, circulation and consumption of a TV programme. The format is not a simple or a single entity and cannot be encountered as a stand-alone, unitary object. Without core or essence, it is manifest in a series of overlapping but separate forms. More paradoxically still, a format is a kind of abstraction known only through the various shadows that it casts, although these are collectively deemed sufficient to persuade many of its actual existence. In addition, the general name of format is also attached to some of its constituents as, in part, a means of indicating that these belong to the larger package. In short, the key question to ask is not What is a format? but rather What does a format permit or facilitate? (Moran and Malbon 2006: 1–14).

The aim of our collection is to offer bold, imaginative and systematic designs for understanding currents in television template trade in both the short and the long term. As this volume highlights, the exchange of television programme formats has an extended pedigree. So too has critical research on the subject with a tradition of inquiry that can be traced back to the 1980s; Mats Nylund’s chapter in this book offers a very useful overview of its trajectory. These opening pages serve to highlight the continuing restlessness that is afoot in programme format adaptation, calling for analysis that is imaginative, agile, energetic and ongoing. Our introduction focuses on three matters. First, by way of emphasizing that formats offer rich, intriguing opportunities for analysis, we suggest an extended agenda, sources and strategies for critical format research. Our second part follows on from here: Further elaborating on the rich opportunities for format inquiry, we offer a short case study example regarding the linguistic parameters involved in the international flow of formats. Even if formats are universal and global in intention (if not in fact), this is not the case with specific adaptations as our example will show. The third part provides a guide to the chapters that make up the collection, outlining their specific aims as well as how they jostle against their neighbours. Finally, a brief conclusion draws together the significant overall elements.

Fields of Format Research

Several scholars have already identified a series of subjects and approaches relevant to television programme franchising (Esser 2013; Oren and Shahaf 2012; Moran 2009a, 2009b, 2013, 2015). Here we offer a digest of these realms that identifies eight possible types of format study.

The most obvious approach, which has attracted greatest attention in individual articles and edited collections, has been that of cultural analysis. Using methods derived from media studies, cultural studies and, more remotely, literary studies, researchers have investigated programmes in terms of how they reflect and qualify cultural patterns within the particular society in which they find embodiment. Sometimes that milieu is seen narrowly in terms of the characteristics of a national television system, although it is often seen more expansively in terms of broader social, political and historical currents. Some of the earliest of these analyses are those by Skovmand (1992), Cooper-Chen (1994) and Moran (1998). More recent contributions to this rapidly expanding field include those by Adriaens and Biltereyst (2012), Zwaan and de Bruin (2012), Ganguli (2012), Hetsroni (2004), King (2010), Larkey (2010), Lewis (2010), Mikos and Perrotta (2012), Motti (2012), Sen (2012) and Shahaf (2012).

This approach has been extended through cross-national comparison, using particular adaptations of a format as a means of offering broader contrast between two or more different national cultures and societies. Formats such as those of Big Brother, Survivor, (Pop) Idol and Ugly Betty among others have well served this kind of inquiries (Cooper-Chen 2005; Heller 2007; Jensen 2007 and 2008; Lewis 2009; Zwan and de Bruin 2012; McCabe and Akass 2013). Interestingly, these studies frequently involve interpretative services and multilingual competences. While these problems are met by establishing a transnational

team of two or more researchers, no researcher – to date – has highlighted this dimension of cross-national format study.

Another approach is beholden to other methodologies of inquiry having to do with business studies and political economy. It focuses on money rather than meaning, commerce rather than culture. The strategy here has been to identify the major companies involved in the trade and the various formats that make up their wares. This kind of analysis is concerned with the underlying commercial and political practice of TV programme franchising which situates formats in a larger financial environment characterized by competition, merger, acquisition and legal protection (Moran and Keane 2004; Moran and Malbon 2006; Magdar 2004; Waisbord 2004; Bielby and Harrington 2008; Havens 2006; Chalaby 2010; Esser 2010).

Five additional modes of television format study can also be mentioned. The first of these investigates the legal dimensions of formats in different jurisdictions. Here the focus is with such matters as Intellectual Property law, regulation, legal actions and court decisions. The first handbook concerning the business of formats was written by a Dutch legal practitioner (van Manen 1994), but there has been little follow-up by critical legal researchers with the exception of Singh and Kretschner (2012). In fact, such a comment only applies to English-speaking jurisdictions. Informally, we hear of such specialists working elsewhere in non-English jurisdictions such as – in the case of western Europe – those of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Another kind of study aims at developing a more robust conceptual account of format adaptation and remaking. From this point of view, format remaking may be new but the principle is not. Semiotics, Structuralism, Performance Theory, Genre Theory and Translation Theory, among other systematics, offer many insightful contexts for understanding the phenomenon and meaning of TV formats. Of course, any analysis of formats (or any other cultural commodity) is always contextualizing but need not take the form of big theory as it does in this instance. In turn, the phenomenon of franchised remaking is very common across many sectors of knowledge and culture industries so that adaptation research is also productively enhanced in such contexts (Moran and Keane 2004; Zwan and de Bruin 2012). Meanwhile, another type of exploration as exemplified by Part 2 of this collection might concentrate on more historical inquiry. Studying some of the many instances of broadcast remaking inside particular national boundaries over the longer term helps reveal more complex patterns of international contact than is often supposed (cf. Keinonen 2009; Ferrari 2012).

Two other approaches to the study of television programme formats complete this survey. The first has to do with more microscopic, lower-level sociological studies of television organizations, including the roles and practices of different agents and the various processes of format operations. There are many sites where research can be conducted. While gaining access to television workplaces is always a problem for researchers, participant observation, interviews, conversations and other interactions at the format coalface can, nevertheless, make a valuable contribution to the field of study (cf. Esser and Jensen 2015; Jensen 2013; Baltruschat 2010; Caldwell 2006; Hartley 2005; Moran 2009a, 2009b; Moran and Malbon 2006).

Our final arena of format investigation lies along this same axis of participant conversation. It has to do with viewers, users, fans and others who variously watch, text, chat, vote and participate in many different interpretative communities (cf. Holt and Samson 2014; King 2010). What understandings do audiences have of formatted programmes? How do they consume these programmes? Do they also view other national versions of formats and, if so, then how? How do viewers respond to the universality of formats? Why do formatted programmes seem to fit well into the current social environment of television? As the last part of our collection highlights, these and other questions related to the format world of the viewer are especially rich and intriguing lines of inquiry.

The eight methods of TV format investigation summarized here provide an overview of approaches used to date, but by no means exhaust the different research possibilities warranted by the advent of this engaging commercial and cultural commodity. Instead, they serve to highlight our collective excitement at the conceptual and practical challenge posed by the phenomenon and our invitation to other communication analysts to join us in the field. In the next section, we offer a more detailed case study by way of further exemplifying the variety of topics that may be meaningfully studied under the format umbrella.

A Case Study Example: Researching the Linguistic Dimensions of Formats

Language is central to the various spaces of the format cycle – whether centralized through distribution, localized in production or embodied in particular producers with different first language skills. The world television format trade is linguistically both homogeneous and heterogeneous in spite of its apparent transnationality and global reach. Most television formats are western in origin, designated as the Euro-American/Anglo-American block (Tunstall and Machin 1999; Tunstall 2008). These include the richest and most affluent markets of the world (Alvarado 1998). Consequently, the language of the TV programme format trade is predominantly English. This language has a central place in the market exchange of formats even though licence discussions and deals often take place in other languages. It is the language of advantage (Collins 1989) and has claims to world language status, perhaps even the lingua franca of the globe. English appears to be wedded to global media in a variety of modes (Crystal 2003: 11–28). Of approximately seven billion people on the planet, some two billion speak English either as a first or second language. In fact, it is the very large number of those who use English as a second language – approximately 1.6 billion – that compels its recognition as the lingua franca of the planet.

However, despite the centrality of English to trade, the process of international circulation of television programmes takes significant account of another linguistic reality. This has to do with the existence of different geo-linguistic markets. As Waisbord puts it, television programs in vernacular languages continue to anchor a sense of cultural belonging and function as a privileged site for the reproduction of nations (2004: 373). TV format adaptations can play a significant role in the maintenance of particular languages around the world and in the marginalization of other languages. These are usually not the languages of minority groups within a particular viewing population, although there may be exceptions. Instead, where there is linguistic diversity within a television market, one language will generally be singled out as the language of advantage on the basis of population size, wealth and political clout. As sub-national, national or even supra-national forms of communication, dominant or majority languages become part of the means of customizing a TV programme format. A global effect of the business deployment of English in the TV format trade is that it affirms and enhances the significance of local or national culture in the specific form of language.

Here, it is useful to note Crystal’s perception of an emerging linguistic versatility in nation after nation that uses alternative linguistic standards for different purposes. Equally, Internet websites alert us to the frequent existence of twin linguistic worlds of global English on the one hand and a local language on the other. English is used for intelligibility while another, perhaps local, language or lingo is used for identity purposes (Crystal 2003: 95). TV formats testify both to the globalization of television and to its nationalization or even its localization. English may well be the language of the TV format industry, but the TV format culture may choose to speak in other idioms and accents.

Both dimensions are significant so far as an understanding of formats is concerned. This linguistic duality appears to represent a global stratification between the worldly, cosmopolitan elites of the programme trade and the popular audiences that they are producing and buying for. Two cultures exist side by side with complex two-way interaction taking place between these two worlds. Local media professionals function as important gatekeepers in this process. Their role is not only to localize the global but also to globalize the local.

In brief, we would suggest that, while English might indeed be the globally favoured form for conducting business in the area of TV formats, and for helping to oversee and manage elements of distribution and even production so far as re-versioning is concerned, nevertheless, this language (or family of languages) has no particular preeminence when it comes to the international linguistic accessioning of the programme. Any account of Anglophonic media dominance drawn from the centralized activities of the television format trade must also attend to the veritable linguistic kaleidoscope occurring at the periphery in which global television programme distribution occurs.

Our concern in this section has been to signal yet another dimension of inquiry for television formats. As this case study example shows, examining some of the linguistic dimensions of the format seems to be yet another way of engaging with this paradoxical and intriguing phenomenon. It suggests the possibility of further avenues of approach other than those described so far. Having outlined these different entry points for television format research, we turn to the work of our contributors.

About the Collection

Twenty chapters are brought together in this volume. These arose from two different research initiatives. The first grew from a resolve to collect a volume of papers related to the twentieth-century, age of broadcasting prehistory of the current boom in television programme format adaptation, while the second came about thanks to an online symposium regarding television programme format research held at Aarhus University in Denmark in November 2013. Inevitably, papers overlapped topic boundaries, sometimes focused on similar topics and even parallelled or complemented each other. In other words, the groupings signalled in the content list represent one kind of arrangement and might have been ordered differently. That said, five interpretative strategies provide the book’s scaffolding. These have to do with explicit attempts, first, to develop systematic, contextualist understandings of format adaptation; second, to develop more long-term, historical perspectives on the practice; third, to analyse activities of industry organizations and gatekeepers; fourth, to connect adaptations occurring in different places, and fifth, to investigate format adaptations’ multiple audiences, both behind and before the television screen.

Overviews

Part 1 focuses on the explicit contextualizings of the television format phenomenon. The authors of the chapters in this part are variously concerned with developing concrete, middle-range schemes or patterns relating to this kind of franchising practice. Chapter 1 offers a marketing perspective on formats as a central feature of the current television landscape. It distinguishes between format creation and adaption at local and global levels, and focuses in particular on the new specializations that have come about in Europe and elsewhere between public-service broadcasters on the one hand and independent production companies on the other. According to author Mats Nylund, formats stand for not only cost efficiency and less creativity, but are also about transnational creative flows, building creative environments and finding creative space within these technologies. Chapter 2 discusses the hybrid status of formats. In this chapter, social science researcher Claudio Coletta sounds an important theme that is echoed by others in this collection. This involves a total decolonization of the later version of a format-based programme from an earlier incarnation of that entity. Drawing on a suite of contemporary practices in such fields as management studies, game theory, science and technology studies as well as television format studies, he detects an ontological shift in the status of objects replicas and imitations that in turn translate and betray an original. In short, the very idea of the format dissolves the concept of originality and institutionalizes practices of imitation and homogenization.

Chapter 3 also has to do with large contextualizing schema for grasping the phenomenon of the format. Daniel Biltereyst and Lennart Soberon explore the growth of genre hybridity, cross-genre and genre-fertility embodied in the meta-genre that is reality television. The authors see the latter as continuing to develop new subtypes thereby responding to fresh content, changing audience sensibilities and new media platforms, underlining once again the very mixed nature of television. Meanwhile, the last chapter in Part 1 offers a more historical map for understanding the format landscape. This involves a historical and contemporary outline of the development of the television format trade. Jean K. Chalaby offers a three-part schema of this evolution, delineating a time of invention from around 1940 to 1970, one of internationalization from 1980 to 2000 and a period of globalization since 2000. Even more importantly, he delineates format exchange as an Anglo-American development initially but goes on to state that it has become increasingly complex with the algorithmic flows of formats, a theme that is also significant in Part 3 of the collection.

History

Chalaby’s chapter is a useful prelude to Part 2, which details early signs of the cultural and commercial phenomenon that was to burst forth at the end of the twentieth century. Chapter 5 deals with a remarkable television event that helped inaugurate Italian television in the very early 1950s. Author Milly Buonanno identifies the programme Medea’s Children as a remarkable television presentation that has claims to be a television format, a tribute and successor to two radio forerunners (one well known and one that was far from famous), an exercise in modernist genre transgression that camouflaged its aesthetic violations by means of overlaying the demands of fiction with those of news and factual reportage. Chapter 6 examines what seems to be the first television programme that was consciously developed as a format and systematically franchised across multiple markets, beginning in the United States and then distributed offshore. Heidi Keinonen reports on Romper Room, the first format programme that was adapted for broadcast in Finland, although the variations permitted by the distributor handling the property were strictly controlled.

The third chapter in Part 2 also has to do with elements of a European television past. Lothar Mikos and Yulia Yurtaeva investigate two regional, pan-national television song contests that mirrored and rivalled one another between the 1950s and the early 1990s. These were programme events designed to headline two different television broadcasting unions based in western Europe and in the Communist Eastern bloc respectively. As television song contests, the programmes could highlight national memberships of these unions, with spectacle and music substituting for any overt reference to politics. Chapter 8 has to do with developments in Columbian television in the 1980s and 1990s, which Chalaby has referred to as the period of format internationalization. Authors Hernan David Espinosa-Medina and Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed trace a series of programme adaptations drawn not only from the United States but also from other parts of South America and western Europe. Their chapter can also be usefully related to Part 1 of the collection, in that the authors arrange their examples as a morphology of degrees of programme adaptation.

Industry Players, Big and Small

This part focuses on the business side of format movement. Continuing the historical note of some of the previous chapters, Chapter 9 by Albert Moran and Karina Aveyard examines the series of commercial television tributaries that fed into the mighty river that is now FremantleMedia. The private companies that were the direct forerunners of the latter were small, under-capitalized and marginal, and their successive takeovers heralded the emergence of format exchange as a global business. However, since FremantleMedia is not the only significant global business entity, the following two chapters focus on elements of public service television’s involvement with formats. Chapter 10 by Jeanette Steemers can be read in conjunction with those by Hernan David Espinosa-Medina and Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed on the one hand and Heidi Keinonen on the other. Steemers distinguishes a series of levels of programme localizations in the contemporary global television ecology, as this has to do with childrens’ television, and explores just why formally licensed formats have not been extensively used in this sector.

Chapter 11 focuses on the BBC and its multiple broadcast outlets. Janet McCabe takes the Swedish detective fiction series Wallander as case study in order to investigate the various platform presentations of this hero to the UK viewing public. She shows how different BBC broadcast windows operate according to different ideological logics. The three different versions of Wallander are seen to fit the particular frameworks of their respective broadcast windows as well as reinforce the BBC’s contemporary sense of its public service ideological remit. Rounding out this part, Tiina Räisä develops a more microscopic case study related to how contemporary Finnish television producers make sense of their work, whether that has to do with adapting international formats or making locally originated programmes. Adopting the anthropological concept of ritual, she highlights how this practice helps them make sense of their work activities in themselves and in terms of reaffirming a sense of what it is to be Finnish.

Territories and Markets

A large number of the chapters mentioned so far have had an implicit geographical dimension. This is reinforced in Part 4 that focuses on three particular settings. The chapter by Michael Keane and Coco Ma offers an overview of television in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) and its engagement with programme formats. Formatting in China is related to reforming China’s television industry and helping to introduce generic diversity. Yet, the paradox is that several of the mega formats that have worked spectacularly well elsewhere have fared poorly in China even though indigenous matchmaking formats and adaptations of talent shows have flourished. The next two chapters deal with mega format successes in Africa. In Chapter 14, Martin Nkosi Ndlela develops a political economy account of television formats in the sub-Saharan region, focusing mainly on Anglophone Southern, Eastern and West Africa. He notes that these developments are occurring in a larger context determined by political systems, technological changes and socio-economic transformations thereby facilitating the consolidation of regional market clusters, with inter-regional, pan-African and global linkages. Tess Conner’s paper adds to this picture by offering a more detailed account of Idols as a commercial and cultural property that was adapted for two different viewing and accessing platforms in Africa. Using the concept of recursion, she examines the changing pathway of production involved in adaptation, thereby highlighting empirical riches and methodological promise. Meanwhile, Sharon Shahaf focuses on another national player in the world of television formats. This is Israel, a newcomer to the game of format import and export, wealthy so far as its viewership is concerned but coming off a small national population base. Still, the advent of formats furnishes opportunities not available in more established international media arrangements, causing Shahaf to highlight how Israel has recently become a significant player in this global trade.

Producers and Audiences

The last part of the collection moves the reader in the direction of reflection regarding formats. Chapter 17 by Christopher Hogg has to do with the transatlantic flow of UK-originated crime series and the reception afforded by their US adaptations. Using the British original Life on Mars and its American offspring as a case study, Hogg points out that such translations are regularly received with varying degrees of hostility by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Given an increasing viewer hyperawareness regarding such format replication, a sense of place can be an important cultural anchor in any particular format outing. Such has been the case with the Danish/Swedish crime series The Bridge and its North American and western European offsprings. Annette Hill examines these three instances in Chapter 18 by means of an interpretative continuum that situates producers at one end and ordinary viewers at the other end of such a community.

Chapter 19 reports on a large-scale study of global talent show format audiences undertaken in Britain, Denmark, Finland and Germany. The authors Andrea Esser, Pia Majbritt Jensen, Heidi Keinonen and Anna Maria Lemor identify an increasingly complex cultural engagement and sense of cultural space on the part of their interview subjects. Indeed, the latter includes an emerging transnational sensibility no doubt determined in part by that format hyperawareness that has already been noticed by both Hogg and Hill. In turn, the concluding chapter of the book by Elisa Giomi and Marta Perrotta reports on an audience study of online discussion of the Italian version of another talent show format, The Voice. Reception study of format television is still very much in its infancy and this is especially the case with analyses of sexualities that focus on representation and viewer response. Hence, Giomi and Perrotta make a significant contribution to this field through their investigation of the depiction of gender models and subsequent discourses of queer identities in talent shows generally and in The Voice in particular.

Finally, then, beyond the detail of this introduction, we would remind the reader that just as programme format franchising is a relatively new way of doing television so far as mainstream media is concerned, the systematic investigation of the phenomenon and meaning of the TV format is also a novel undertaking in the field of communication and cultural studies. Summing up, we suggest that this book intervenes and pushes forward scholarship in three distinct ways. First, it recognizes that a changing field of research demands new conceptual tools. One of the most useful ways to furnish some of these is through the interdisciplinarity engaged in by many of our contributors. Second, analysis should be prepared to make minor as well as major contributions to the field. A locally based empirical study of a particular situation can be just as revealing and valuable as more theoretical suggestion and discussion about how we understand formats. Finally, the collection highlights the cosmopolitism involved in TV format study. The reader of these pages derives transnational understanding of current and recent situations regarding developments in larger television markets such as those of Nigeria and China as well as much smaller ones such as Finland and Israel. The value of this comparative turn in media enquiry deserves more recognition than it sometimes gets.

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Part 1

Overviews

Chapter 1

Television Format as a Transnational Production Model

Mats Nylund

One of the most notable developments in the television industry in recent years is the growth of the global television format industry (Küng 2008: 183). Television formats pervade programme listings seemingly everywhere (see Esser 2013; Jensen 2013). A recent study describes reality television as the biggest genre in Finnish television, making up no less than 21 per cent of the television content (Juntunen and Koskenniemi 2013). Not all realities are formats, but many of them are, and realities are certainly one of the key genres of the format trade (Chalaby 2011: 294).

Formats involve selling and buying intellectual property. The buyer acquires rights to recreate a programme on a local market with the same logic, often with the same theme music, and possibly also with translated scripts (see Moran and Malbon 2006, Moran 2009; Haven 2006; Oren and Shahaf 2012; Jensen 2013). The supply chain in television formats can involve several local adaptations of one global format. Thus, format production is inherently a transnational activity. Accordingly, formats can be defined as a television show with a distinctive narrative that is licensed outside its country of origin in order to be adapted to local audiences (Chalaby 2011: 296; see also FRAPA 2011: 5). The licensing and adaption of the format, and the buying and selling of intellectual property, is obviously at the heart of the global format trade.

However, there is also a broader and less specific understanding of formats. Within the industry, the notions of format and formatting are also used to refer to standardized sets of production practices that enable an industrial and cost-effective production and reproduction of television content (Lantzsch et al. 2009: 80). Hence, in this chapter, format is primarily understood as licensed and adapted television shows. However, at some points I will also discuss formats in the wider sense of the word, as standardized sets of production practices.

The rise of the format industry is related to several changes in television industry in the last 20 years (Moran 2006; Küng 2008). Digitization, globalization and commercialization come across as key tendencies. Today, there is an abundance of content, channels and companies that struggle to attract an increasingly fragmented audience. Even the most popular programmes seldom come up to similar audience figures than in the previous decades. Falling audiences have led to lower programme budgets. This has resulted in an increased demand for more cost-efficient types of content, such as formats. Obviously, public service television and commercial television companies experience changes and tendencies in the television industry somewhat differently. For instance, in Denmark public service television programming format adaption still constitutes a relatively small proportion of total production, whereas there has been an explosive rise in the Danish commercial television sector (Jensen 2013: 99).

In both public service and commercial television, there has been an extensive outsourcing of programming. The format industry has strongly contributed to the rise of a new form of television production system in which content is increasingly produced by independent production companies (indies) that operate outside the television channels and sell programmes to broadcasters.

Aim of the Chapter

The purpose of this research is to understand television formats and how they change the television industry. What is a television format? How can we approach and explain television formats here? Why do formats dominate the television industry? How does format production relate to and differ from traditional television production?

A large part of the academic research in formats, and television in general, is concerned