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...