Global Television Formats

This study examines the recent popularity of Korean television shows, their format contracts, and various remakes in China. Rather than focusing on specific cases, it attempts to develop a theoretical understanding on the regional flows of television programs through inter-Asian frameworks. In so doing, it suggests reframing the television format phenomenon between South Korea and China as cultural assemblages, which include not only the details of format contracts but also the reciprocal interchanges of various levels of human, financial, and cultural elements. Approaching television formats as cultural assemblages contributes to framing the format phenomenon as an inter-Asian wave rather than limiting it to a nation-centric approach. In so doing, inter-Asian frameworks approach the format phenomenon as a tool for facilitating cultural encountering, mutual understanding, and social imaginations among regional people. As a conclusion, we suggest that Korean Wave studies is ready to produce a theoretical perspective or concepts and to provide another idiosyncratic yet compatible model in global television studies.

Comparing different versions of Undercover Boss reveals how an assemblage of TV producers, camera crews, businesses , and broadcasters choose to portray corporate hierarchies during the financial crisis of 2008 when corporations seemed like especially vulnerable forms of social organization for workers to rely upon. This article approaches the same show done in two different countries as a natural experiment that can reveal national differences through a textual comparison. The US show relies upon a sentimental imagination such that knowledge of the other is based on an emotional connection to the past. The UK show relies upon an organizational imagination in which the structural roles one plays in a company shape what one knows of how the company functions. Each version portrays distinctive approaches to three issues: (1) what can be known about people as social actors; (2) what is portrayed as ethical or appropriate workplace relationships; and (3) what kinds of tacit critiques of contemporary capitalism are possible.

In their book Reading Television (1978: 64-5), John Fiske and John Hartley define television as a medium that provides the members of a particular community with a “confirming, reinforcing version of themselves.” Although the introduction of the unfamiliar and innovative via televisual productions is a business imperative as well as a cultural necessity today, television continues to function as a mirror of its receiving society, and provide its viewers with culturally appropriate content through its various semiotic modes of communication situated within the visual, verbal, and sound tracks. Televisual productions, in this sense, can be viewed as one of the most salient multimodal texts through which our everyday politics are continuously materialized, fictionalized, and rendered into an entertaining popular language that shapes our everyday perceptions and expectations. Transnational format adaptations, in particular, stand out as ample content- rich texts in which the processes of localization and appropriation, realized through individual semiotic choices made by producers, manifest themselves. It is the goal of this paper to trace back such semiotic choices made during the re-production phase of transnational format adaptations, and reveal sociocultural and political interventions in meaning making at the time, through a multimodal analysis of an American comedy crime series, Monk, and its Turkish adaptation, Galip Derviş.

Despite continual improvements in production and writing quality, live-action Russian series have fared poorly in the global market. While many deals have been struck, Western remakes of Russian series have failed to appear, and live-action programs have failed to find mainstream audiences outside of Russia. Russian animated series, on the other hand, have enjoyed global success. The success and failure of different types of Russian series in the global media market suggests that many of the central problems of cultural exchange remain. Issues related to cost and risk continue to impede the global transfer of live-action series and formats from Russia even as animated series have become the most widely viewed Russian media products in history.

By allowing a separation between content development and final production, global formats help traditionally isolated industries to break through the linguistic and geo-cultural barriers that hindered their participation in the finished global trade. Moreover, formats are at the heart of the process through which television, as a global medium, is responding to its changing environment.  As the medium is faced with growing pressures to adjust to the presence of new media convergence, TV industries around the world are interacting in their efforts to rework the medium’s popular forms. The rise of formatting exchange practices thus mark a radical decentring of the process through which the medium generates and regenerates its ‘formula art’ (Fiske 1987).
To illustrate the complexity of flows involved here one would be hard pressed to find a better example than the recent emergence of the Israeli format industry into as unlikely ‘global Cinderella’. Understanding why and how Israeli companies achieved their global success stands to teach us something about the reconfiguration of the centre-periphery relationship in contemporary ‘planet TV’. 
While the most prevalent discussion of formats is heavily focused on the question of travel, knowledge transfer or franchising (formats are shows that get packaged in one territory and reproduced in another), this chapter poses that to understand their radical potential we must explore the practice of formatting as a fundamental process for television content development even before transnational transfer takes place. Therefore, before the chapter turns to discuss the implications of the Israeli case study, it first explores the significance of formatting for television, starting with the fundamental question: what are formats before they get packaged for transnational reproduction? Using a television studies analysis of medium, culture and industry, the chapter offers a wider historical and theoretical context for the practice of formatting to help explain how the transnational “stretching” of the process helped intervene in the established hierarchies of core-periphery that have underpinned the cultural dominance of the US in the global television industry.

Extending back the insight offered by the emerging framework of global television formats, this
article examines the production and public reception of the first Israeli sitcom, Krovim-Krovim,
produced by Israeli Educational Television (IETV) between 1982 and 1986. As the first fullblown
Israeli series and a show modeled on the globally popular sitcom formula, Krovim-Krovim
was simultaneously celebrated for its Israeliness and condemned as a potential source of Western
‘cultural contamination’. The concerns converging around Krovim-Krovim in 1980s Israel are
representative of a larger global trend in that period that witnessed ‘the second wave of
globalization’. The simplistic media imperialism scenario that still dominates scholarship of these
trends fails to grasp the complexities typifying the process of globalization. Representing as they
do simultaneous standardization and heterogenization of form and content across borders, global
television formats seems to embody these complexities. By reevaluating IETV’s sitcom
production as an early case of format adaptation this article demonstrates the promises of this
fresh outlook for the study of historical as well as contemporary trends in television globalization.
By foregrounding the perspective of ‘local’ producers and critics, this article explores the cultural
significance of format adaptation for marginal and belated broadcast systems - like 1980s Israeli
television.

This article elucidates a typology for cross-culturally comparing different versions of television formats. Digital tools are used to derive quantitative data based on temporal parameters of episode or genre of the narrative structure, content, and sequencing. Type one, which we also call “transposed narratives,” retains the narrative structure and sequencing while extending and expanding the narrative structure to readjust to longer broadcast times. Type two, which we call ‘transmutated narratives,’ re-distributes and re-organizes the narrative structure and sequencing to adjust to both extended broadcast time and other culturally relevant proximity issues. Type three adaptations display genre structure similarities while narrative structure, sequencing and content diverge. These we call ‘derived narratives.’

This paper investigates the circulation of gender models and discourses of queer identities in talent show formats, a relatively “old” genre that has recently reflourished in Italian TV market. Our concern is with the politics of representation of non-normative sexual orientations:  are  the GLBT characters featuring in talent shows “domesticated”, i.e. represented in forms that blunt their power to challenge the binary system of gender and the gender role models that are hegemonic in this TV genre? Or, does the imagery produced by these shows open up for counter-discourses and for a space of resistance to the ideology of heteronormativity?
Secondly, our analysis will explore the way production cultures and routines influence the politics of representation. We will interview the authors of the most representative talent shows (X Factor and The Voice of Italy) to study how discourses on queer and queerness are generated in the creative process.

This article elucidates a typology for cross-culturally comparing different versions of television formats. Digital tools are used to derive quantitative data based on temporal parameters of episode or genre of the narrative structure, content, and sequencing. Type one, which we also call “transposed narratives,” retains the narrative structure and sequencing while extending and expanding the narrative structure to readjust to longer broadcast times. Type two, which we call ‘transmutated narratives,’ re-distributes and re-organizes the narrative structure and sequencing to adjust to both extended broadcast time and other culturally relevant proximity issues. Type three adaptations display genre structure similarities while narrative structure, sequencing and content diverge. These we call ‘derived narratives.’