Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders

by Oren; Tasha

• ISBN13: 9780415965446
• ISBN10: 0415965446
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-23
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

No televisual shift has so shaken traditional models of media studies as the recent explosion of format television around the world. Straddling local and global production, circulation and viewership, television formats both represent and shape the current landscape of television, and offer a particularly current vantage point on global cultural exchange. The chapters assembled in this collection take up the format phenomena from multiple locations--the Middle East, Western and Eastern Europe, South and West Africa, South and East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, North America, South America, and the Caribbean--to examine how and why format television is so central to the global cultural experience. Contributors address both little known examples and massive global hits ranging from the Idol franchise around the world, to telenovelas, dance competitions, sports programming, reality TV, quiz shows, sitcoms and more, offering a wide spectrum of perspectives on how format history, market, technology and industry development, political and social forces and changing audiences participate in the shaping of global media culture and contemporary entertainment.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. viii
List of Contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Introduction: Television Formats-A Global Framework for TV Studies	p. 1
Format Theories and Global Television	p. 21
More than Copycat Television: Format Adaptation as Performance	p. 23
"Calling Out Around the World": The Global Appeal of Reality Dance Formats	p. 39
Television Formats and Contemporary Sport	p. 56
A Political Economy of Formatted Pleasures	p. 72
Interpreting Cubanness, Americanness, and the Sitcom: WPBT-PBS's ?Qué pasa U.S.A.? (1975-1980)	p. 90
Transnational Formats: Historical Perspectives	p. 109
From Discrete Adaptations to Hard Copies: The Rise of Formats in European Television	p. 111
"National Mike": Global Host and Global Formats in Early Italian Television	p. 128
Telenovelas in Brazil: From Traveling Scripts to a Genre and Proto-Format both National and Transnational	p. 148
Reversal of Fortune? Hollywood Faces New Competition in Global Media Trade	p. 178
Case Study: The Idol Franchise	p. 201
Idol Worship: Ethnicity and Difference in Global Television	p. 203
NZ Idol: Nation Building Through Format Adaptation	p. 223
Global Television Formats in Africa: Localizing Idol	p. 242
We Are the World: American Idol's Global Self-Posturing	p. 260
Trans-Formats: Local Articulations and the Politics of Place and Nation	p. 283
The Social and Political Dimensions of Global Television Formats: Reality Television in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia	p. 285
A Revolution in Television and a Great Leap Forward for Innovation? China in the Global Television Format Business	p. 306
Global Television Formats and the Political Economy of Cultural Adaptation: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in India	p. 323
Global Franchising, Gender, and Genre: The Case of Domestic Reality Television	p. 346
Reiterational Texts and Global Imagination: Television Strikes Back	p. 366
Index	p. 382
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