Abstract
Today, the worldwide trade of TV formats is a multi-billion business. Chalaby explores the industry’s product development throughout the 20th century until today and at the interfaces of conflicting interests: the interests of international organizations in industry property protection, the interests of state governments to produce national identity and community, the interests of emerging commercial channels to compete against public service broadcasters, and the interests of worldwide operating distribution and production conglomerates such as Freemantle and Endemol that reset the export business of a creative industry.
The introduction provides clear definitions of the diverse formats (scripted, unscripted, trade business, recipe, formula, rights, and package) of radio and TV products (reality and game shows, fiction drama). The book is chronologically structured into three parts where Chalaby unfolds the inner logics of an economically globalizing TV business from a combined media studies, management, and globalization studies perspective.
Part 1 covers the time period from the middle of the 20th century to the 1990s in which the cornerstones of the worldwide format industry were established: the invention of TV formats, the emergence of commercial TV channels and related entertainment market competition, the extension of a consumer market for content to daytime broadcasting, the developing of franchising by international distributors, and the development of a few producers and distributors into key players. Those factors created a demand and transformed the format business into an international trade which expanded worldwide in the 21st century. It took the development of four extremely successful game and reality shows – Millionaire, Big Brother, Survivor and Idols – into super formats to prove the power of the TV format product and to convince industry executives. The super formats established the key principles of successful TV franchises, multi-media storytelling, and multi-platform revenue generation.
Chalaby applies world systems theory and its concept of global commodity chains to disentangle transnational conglomerate structures that featured the disintegration of the TV production system. In Part 2, Chalaby decodes how the emergence of super formats and the development of a global format trading system brings together independent economic agents, international institutions, places, networks, and commodities. He analyses why this led to the development of an international support system and the transnational reorganization of content creation and TV production. The results are transnational networks of TV companies that are internationally dependent and interweave local state public service broadcasters. This in turn leads to an accelerating internationalization process in the 21st century. The consequences are local; in order to strengthen export from the creative industries, states are required to provide the necessary infrastructure of TV production expertise and capability. Formats are still produced under licence but rights holders increasingly prefer to adapt and produce themselves. Super-groups make local intellectual property travel globally; TV shows and series develop into the standardized ‘super format’ product.
In Part 3, Chalaby explores the key industry trends from 2000 to the time of writing the book. He provides a detailed overview of the development of game show and reality formats, explains how they are risk and outcome managed, and explores what makes them entertaining. Interestingly, drama, stories, and heroes turn out not to be a distinct feature of TV fiction series. All global TV format products across genres also share the key elements of setting, casting, and editing. A new product TV format franchise emerges where the intellectual property of a show not only crosses borders but also platforms.
The flows of TV format production remain uneven. While the United Kingdom is still the leading supplier of scripted formats, Scandinavia and Israel are among the new emerging export territories in the global TV format business. According to Chalaby, their approaches differ. Israelis produce standardized products for a world market, while Scandinavians produce for a local market before the shows hit the road. However, the question is whether Chalaby mixes up the locality of the first adaptation to either a local or to an international market with the development of different TV product types. The book is furnished with a comprehensive reference list and a useful index allowing for purposeful key word search.
According to Chalaby, this study of ‘television’s entertainment revolution’ both extends his work previously published in international journals and (in part) corrects it. Unfortunately, no detailed information is provided that would validate these claims. A highly appreciated quality of this comprehensive media study is that it offers a theory-based, thorough analysis of industry sources. The sources comprise trade reports and press with interviews of influential individuals in the TV industries and provide inside knowledge not previously accessible in the public space.
With ‘The Format Revolution’, Chalaby successfully escapes media studies’ identified tendency to blindly operate within a national discourse. Thus, the book does not take its point of departure in the implicit notion of a national culture being the key driver for the UK-based industry successfully retaining a leading role in the international TV business. Such a notion of culture would have disguised the political and economic transnational drivers of local TV transformations. Hopefully, this book will serve as an inspiration for future television research to study successful media products as a node, rather than as travelling, yet place-bound outcomes of a distinct national culture.
Chalaby’s well-researched book offers valuable insights into a distinct global media industry branch television. It contributes to the fields of global media studies knowledge about the commercial industry strategies that drive globalization from within local television production. The fact that TV products do not travel alone, but are preceded by market ratings, emphasizes marketing relations as a major driver of diverse, internationally successful television products. Rather than romantic notions of the genius and creative individual, Chalaby places international intellectual property rights at the heart of industry successes. Future studies may emphasize the international management perspective and compare cross-industry franchising practices to better comprehend the making and the workings of global commodity chains for intangibles.