TV Formats Worldwide

Localizing Global Programs

Albert Moran

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781841503066
• eBook ISBN: 9781841503554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Beginning around 2003, the growth of interest in the genre of reality shows has dominated the field of television studies. However, concentrating on this genre has tended to sideline the even more significant emergence of the program format as a central mode of business and culture in the new television landscape. TV Formats Worldwide redresses this balance and heralds the emergence of an important, exciting, and challenging area of television studies. Topics explored include reality TV, makeover programs, sitcoms, talent shows, and fiction serials, as well as broadcaster management policies, production decision chains, and audience participation processes. This seminal work will be of considerable interest to media scholars worldwide.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Introduction: ‘Descent and Modification’

Albert Moran

In the sesquicentennial anniversary year of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, I begin with Darwin’s felicitous phrase regarding the basic mechanism of adaptation in the natural world. This collection deals with cultural reproduction, not biological copying and change. Nevertheless, Darwin’s phrase is significant in helping to orient us towards the fact of television program seriality in general, and format adjustment and production in particular. Like other cultural institutions, television’s appetite for content is voracious. Helping to meet such an ever-increasing demand, the medium inter alia feeds off itself as well as finding other ways to generate new outputs. In turn, semiotics helps identify repetition as a recurring feature of popular fiction and entertainment, whether the form be printed stories, popular song or television program production. The serial principle has to do with the ongoing recourse to a framing mechanism that yet permits and invites the deliberate variation embodied in the instalment, the verse or the episode. The latter are all offspring of one kind or another, whether the features of the forebearer program are easy or difficult to recognize in a descendant program instalment.

The same ambiguity is presented by the recent formalization and recognition of the practice of television program format franchising. The format inaugurates program descent and modification as a formal principle of television production. As an industry practice, it seeks to bolster its significance by elaborating successive activities and material resources, not least to secure and enhance its legal safeguards and monetary rewards. But action also invites reflection, the development of critical consciousness concerning practice, both as a means of developing greater insight for purposes of industry, management and production clarification and as a means of extending greater cultural understanding.

The enigmatic format

Accordingly, this collection provides the opportunity for sustained engagement with the puzzle that is TV format program franchising. The collection’s motivation is twofold. On the one hand, authors seek to analyze the program format franchising phenomenon. This practice is sometimes bracketed with a complementary form of program provision labelled the ‘finished’ program. The latter is thought to be complete and ready for broadcast (even if subtitling or dubbing is necessary to help make the program more intelligible for particular viewers). On the other hand, presumably the format program must need to be ‘finished’ in some specific way or set of ways to be capable of being broadcast in a particular regional or national market. The authors in this volume are all concerned to investigate the pattern and meaning of this kind of process. As I have noted elsewhere, broadcasters in national television markets who are licensing in program material for broadcast frequently face the dilemma of whether to choose a finished program or a format (Moran 1998). The finished program is usually less expensive to license and involves far less bother than having to arrange for a format production based on a franchise. However, broadcasters and producers very often choose to license a program format on the assumption that the format can be finished or completed in such a way that its broadcast will achieve greater audience appeal than a finished counterpart is likely to gain. The demonstrated success of a forebearer program in another television market helps provide this confidence and insurance.

What, then, is involved in finishing a format program? How is it modified for its new circumstances and what does it retain from its previous manifestation? In this collection, this matter is explored through a variety of approaches or research strategies on the part of both emerging and established media scholars and critical researchers. Altogether, some eighteen chapters are brought together in the volume representing critical research being pursued in North and South America, the United Kingdom and Western Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and the South Pacific. Coincidentally, the volume also appears at the same time as another collection, Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders, where the emphasis primarily falls on a US perspective, although again various of its contributors hail from other places around the world (Oren and Shahaf 2009).

Taken together, these two volumes might be seen as inaugurating an important, newly emerging field of contemporary study. TV format studies is set to become a significant subfield of present-day research in media and communications, in cultural studies, in creative industry research, and in a set of allied fields including international studies, globalization studies, business and commerce, legal and policy studies, and management studies. TV format studies represents the conceptual end of practices of content franchising as they are pursued by TV production and broadcasting professionals. As a field of inquiry, it can help inform and illuminate the activities of format professionals just as the practice of professional scan test and modify the understandings and insights developed by critical investigators. TV format studies engages with a series of different phenomena, including the political economy of franchising, the textual consequences of remaking, the legal and governmental frameworks within which such practices occur, the prehistory of such activities and the routines and self-understandings of format professionals as they go about their business. Various universities and centres such as the Institute for Media and Communication Research at the University of Bournemouth in the United Kingdom and the Erich Pommer Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany have now made formal commitments to ongoing involvement in the area of TV format studies in conjunction with different professional format organizations.

Familiarizing formats

Besides the troublesome notion of format adaptation, authors in this volume have had to grapple with the difficulty of applying a suitable term to the broad cultural result of such a process. Many different names can be given to the practice of changing a program to enhance its appeal in a particular territory elsewhere in the world. Synonyms include adapting, remaking, copying, imitating, mimicking, translating, customizing, indigenizing and domesticating. Few, if any, of these terms have a spatial dimension, although this aspect of variation and alteration is highlighted in the title of this collection. Descent and modification of TV programs are contextualized in terms of perceived levels of a multi-level television world. As outlined by O’Regan (1993), Straubhaar (1997) and Chalaby (2005), television is a diverse phenomenon which characteristically exists on several spatial tiers. Although the terms are relative, nevertheless at least five different levels have been identified. Moving up a (televisual) Great Chain of Being, one can perceive levels that can be labelled the local, the national-regional, the national, the world-regional and the global. Each of these tiers has its own distinct history and all have experienced degrees of significance over time. The names of the levels also carry a good deal of vagueness and imprecision. Frequently, over the past 80 years, television appears to have had very little existence or presence at different tiers at different times. Equally, developments at other levels often appear to have overwhelmed or even obliterated some of the other tiers of television’s existence. Hence the development of, first, landline systems and, second, satellite broadcasting capacity seemed to herald the permanent triumph of national television services at the expense of local and regional-national services. More recently, arguments concerning massive cross-border connection and penetration have flourished under the impact of a perceived globalization of communications and culture. One ancillary argument regarding this effect has had to do with political and cultural changes at the sub-national tier having to do with community and locality. However, the world of television does not exclusively consist of that which might be labelled the ‘global’ and the ‘local’. Not only are these problematic terms in themselves, but they are also nagged by the bracketing out of the other levels, most especially that of the national. One of the most persistent notes in the chapters that follow is the issue of whether national television remains important, and indeed whether a term such as ‘local’ is only another way to refer to the national level of television.

In fact, it might be argued that there is little that answers to the name of local or localized television, or a global or globalized television. The notion of the local conjures up ideas of that which is proximate, nearby, immediate, handy, concrete, tribal, homeland-based, communal, and so on. While the medium has, at times – largely for reasons having to do with technology policy and social outlook – been answerable to the name of local television, nevertheless it is debatable whether the kind of customized programming that results from TV format adaptation is usefully understood in this kind of way. This is also the case with the binary opposite form, global television. The term carries suggestions that have to do with the transnational, that which is worldwide, cross-border, international, planetary, universal or even transcultural. Again, there is very little that actually conforms to such a designation in the field of television. What Dayan and Katz (1992) label media events are often of considerable interest to many populations. One thinks of such exceptional events as the first moon walk, the funeral of Princess Diana or more regular international sporting events such as the televising of the Olympic Games or the Soccer World Cup. While the collective audience for such events falls into the billions, nevertheless there are viewers and even nations bypassed by such coverage. Global television seems as much a phantom as local television.

Format trade development

One way in which the interrogation of terms such as ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘global’ might more usefully be pursued is by adumbrating a short history of the deliberate transfer of television program and radio program prototypes. The recontextualization of industry and cultural know-how involved in the adaptation of broadcast programs from one place to another is neither new nor novel. Consideration of the development of TV production knowledge transfer gives the lie to the claim – less frequent nowadays – that television is national whereas cinema is international (Ellis 1982). Such a formula is only half true. In the era of radio broadcasting between 1939 and 1942, for instance, Australian commercial networks saw the systematic importation and redevelopment for broadcast of such US wireless forerunners as Lux Theatre, Big Sister and When a Girl Marries. BBC Radio paid a licence fee to the US originators and producers for its adaptation of the panel show What’s My Line? In Chapter 12, by Gabriele Cosentino, Waddick Doyle and Dimitrina Todorova, the authors speculate that the format of television news was probably widely imitated and adapted from one place to another as television services began in the years after World War II, although little in the way of formal licensing or authorization was involved.

The developments in mainstream radio broadcasting were harbingers of what was to happen in television. The fact that British television began operation in 1936 while US network broadcasting commenced in 1940 meant that other national television systems would, variously, be influenced and shaped by these English-language forerunners. This was certainly the case with Australian television, which on its first night of official transmission in 1956 put to air a remake of a US game show, What’s My Line? Much more of the same kind of thing was to follow. Between 1962 and 1964, for example, Australian commercial television was involved in remaking such daytime ‘reality’ series as People in Conflict and Divorce Court by adapting their American scripts for local circumstances. One of the first deliberately formatted television programs to emerge from the United States in the 1950s, the children’s show Romper Room, was licensed to several regional broadcasters in Australia around the same time. Meanwhile, the public service television broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) set about re-customizing British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) programs for its television service following its long-standing practice in radio broadcasting. Beginning in 1963, it has continued down to the present to remake the BBC current affairs series Panorama as Four Corners. This development was quite unexceptional so far as the BBC and the ABC were concerned. In the time before legal authorization and fee payment became part of the process whereby program knowledge was transferred from place to place, the ABC long believed that imitating the BBC’s program formats was a mark of cultural respect on the part of the institutional offspring towards its symbolic parent. None of these developments outlined in connection with Australian broadcasting is unique to that history. Broadcasting has always been an international as well as a national affair, so the sketch of program knowledge transfer outlined here is repeated again and again in many parts of the world. Broadcasting in radio and television, whether on the part of commercial organizations, public service bodies or state authorities, has never placed unique emphasis on program originality. The high number of broadcast hours needing to be filled has never allowed such a luxury. Hence, copying and customizing program production knowledge has been ongoing, widespread and persistent over the past 80 years.

Nevertheless, it is only in more recent times that a formal international system for the transfer and redeployment of TV formats has begun to emerge. For the most part, the different knowledges accumulated by the original producers remained scattered and undocumented. Format knowledges had to be inferred from the residual traces available in broadcast episodes of the program and, with fiction, from scripts. The situation continues in the present when formats are pirated from their owners. By contrast, it has only been relatively recently – some date the change to around 1990 – that producers have begun to systematize and document various production knowledges that come together under the name of the program format (Moran and Malbon 2006). Product branding and intellectual property recognition have played an important role in this development. Obviously, though, the seeds of the format trade’s evolution lie back in the 1950s and 1960s with programs such as Romper Room and the emergence of service franchising industries.

TV format studies

If tracing the historical development of TV program franchising is a useful way of throwing more light on the puzzling matter of how programs are reshaped to suit audiences in different places, then mapping the emergence of TV format studies as a sub-field of knowledge in media and cultural studies is also valuable. The documentation and analysis of TV format programming presuppose the accessibility of cross-border comparison. Studying format adaptation and production is, at the very least, an international activity if not a global one. Just as the worldwide television trade itself demands the ready availability of such services as lower-cost international travel and telephony, not to mention backup resources such as email, digitalization storage and transmission, and the Internet, so those who would engage in the critical study of the phenomenon and meaning of TV program formats require some of these same facilities. One is reminded that Raymond Williams’ famous analysis of television news on US networks compared with that available on a public service broadcaster such as the BBC was based in part on a trans-Atlantic crossing to the United States that he made by ocean liner some time in the early 1970s (Williams 1974).

Even when these resources of transport and communications are available, various cultural capital and aesthetic and social competences are still required for undertaking this kind of investigation. This truism is variously demonstrated by several of the authors found in this volume. Edward Larkey (Chapter 11), for instance, is a US citizen by birth but is a Professor of German Studies and speaks the language fluently. Thus, he has been in position to undertake the investigation of a TV comedy program format’s adaptation in the United States and in Germany. Pia Majbrit Jensen (Chapter 10) has studied television systems in both her native Denmark and in Australia, and is therefore well placed to discuss the situation of formats in these two national settings. Collaborative research also comes into its own when the subject is TV program franchising in different places. Hence, in Chapter 12, Cosentino, Doyle and Todorova investigate the advent of parody news programs in Italy and Bulgaria sharing linguistic, cultural and political competencies, as well as particular geographical proximities.

These competencies, resources and linkages that are at the heart of TV format studies are worth underscoring because they help emphasize the modern cosmopolitanism that contextualizes this kind of investigation. They also assist in beginning to date th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Modelling and Theory-Building
• Part III: Institutional Approaches
• Part IV: Comparative Cross-Border Studies
• Part V: National Imaginings
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors
• Index