Lords of risky programming

Meet the Kumars. They’re in the process of immigrating to the U.S., where they’ll change their family name to Ortega.

Like so many immigrants before them, they carry a burning desire to fit in and strike it rich in America. They also want to bring along a little something from the home country: a hotly coveted crossover TV show concept.

Thus “The Kumars at No. 42,” a bizarre British talk show in which real guests interact with fake hosts, will become “The Ortegas” when NBC restages it for American audiences.

When it comes to TV, Anglo-American trade is flourishing, with envelope-pushing British programmers dishing up ever more peculiar fare and their U.S. counterparts unabashedly snapping it up quicker than you can say “risk-averse.”

The Brits, NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker freely admits, “are a great farm team.”

Look what else they’re cultivating here on the farm these days:

“The Office,” which recently ended its run on BBC2, centers on a group of colleagues in a stationery company, going about their mundane workday, flirting and rejecting co-workers’ advances as they break for tea, stealing Post-It notes, fighting vicious rounds of cubicle politics, and being trapped into baby-sitting a boss as he blows notes on a beer bottle while the rest of the staff has headed to the pub.

It looks like a documentary, has no laugh track and no obvious jokes. Rupert Gavin, chief executive of BBC Worldwide, the public broadcaster’s commercial arm, frankly calls it weird. Yet it has won top awards recently as Britain’s best sitcom. It’s been so popular that the BBC sells a book of the scripts, side by side with cookbooks from its TV chefs. Americans will be able to decide for themselves in January, when it will air on cable’s BBC America channel.

The upcoming drama “Grease Monkeys,” as dark and as politically incorrect as “The Sopranos,” portrays the world of a dishonest, drug-fueled South Asian car mechanic in Manchester. Mal Young, BBC’s controller for drama series, calls it “racist, sexist, homophobic. It challenges every preconception.” It’s too early to say whether it will travel to the U.S.

The current much-hyped production is the BBC’s “Fame Academy,” a Friday-night talent contest with an element of “Big Brother.” Aspiring stars have moved into London’s biggest private mansion, Witanhurst House, which has been wired with cameras so viewers can spy on the drama and endless practicing leading up to each week’s sing-off. Contestants are booted each week.

For a decade now, British TV executives and their counterparts across Europe have been scrambling genres, shaking up production techniques and mining unusual slices of life for television that falls far outside the circumscribed boundaries of four-camera sitcoms and cop dramas, or even the historical period dramas that populate PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre.”

Americans have had a taste of what it’s all about since the summer of 1999, with “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and, later, “Survivor” and this summer’s “American Idol,” all of which took standard, tired “reality” formats and turned them into high-stakes prime-time drama. Cable’s has prospered by adopting the Brits’ reinvention of how-to shows, adding human tears and laughter to the humdrum room make-over on “Trading Spaces.”

Now, the British are poised for a wholesale invasion, welcomed with open arms by U.S. executives. American television is in the midst of a crisis driven by an uncomfortable convergence of prohibitively high costs for traditional shows such as “Frasier” and “ER,” fickle, fragmented audiences in a multichannel environment and increasingly complex financing schemes, and it’s hungry for fresh ideas, especially economical ones.

British TV executives, Zucker says, “are more willing to take risks because the stakes are a little lower. They take risks we’re not willing to take right away.” That, in turn, “allows us to see things and then make a decision.”

What the Brits have is talk shows, such as “The Kumars at No. 42” and, earlier, “Mrs. Merton” and “Ali G,” in which the hosts are actors, in character, and the guests, not always clued in, are real. Sitcoms run without laugh tracks and in real time; real people get prime-time make-overs. Documentaries might be real or they might just be mockumentaries. There are plenty more Brit-style unscripted series on the way, such as the 15-night-in-a-row “I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here,” a sort-of “Survivor” for has-been celebrities that ABC is remaking for February.

Although the U.S. has been able to develop some of its own “reality” shows, such as “The Bachelor,” executives say they will continue to buy plenty from abroad. In addition, says Andrea Wong, ABC’s executive in charge of alternative programming, “the advantage is, I can see it on tape,” instead of having to conceptualize it from a written proposal.

Colin Jarvis, BBC Worldwide’s director of programming and operations, says he will “wager my next dinner” that a U.S. broadcast network will soon be airing a version of the latest trend to sweep Britain, personal make-over shows, a sort of “Trading Spaces” for fashion and lifestyle. BBC America has one such show set to debut in December, “What Not to Wear,” in which two extremely candid fashion journalists set out to make over real, less-than-perfect people, recruited -- not always willingly -- by friends and family members.

But U.S. networks are also venturing beyond those low-budget formats into trickier-to-translate comedies and dramas. Last month, ABC quietly forged an unprecedented deal with Britain’s Granada Television to jointly produce drama series, with an eye to launching a single show simultaneously in the two countries, perhaps as early as next season.

NBC, meanwhile, is eyeing a remake of the British show “Coupling,” whose American pilot has just been shot, as a quasi-replacement for its about-to-disappear “Friends.” The show, which revolves around almost nothing but the sex lives of its thirtysomething characters, won’t be able to play in the “Friends” early evening time slot, however, because it is too racy. It’s currently airing on BBC America, and although that cable network doesn’t release ratings, its executives say the show is doing very well.

NBC is especially receptive to British imports, both because unlike CBS, Fox and ABC, it is not owned by a studio that provides a steady stream of programs, and because it has aging hit comedies (“Friends” and “Frasier” in particular). So it is paying handsomely for shows like “Coupling” and “The Kumars at No. 42”: According to Variety, it has agreed to pick up the full $750,000-per-episode cost of the latter show, after beating out Fox for the U.S. rights. And the program has been promised a home on one of NBC’s Must-See TV nights, Tuesday or Thursday.

It’s a decidedly unusual show. In Britain, the “Kumar family” is Indian; its “son” has a talk show studio in the back of the home. But before guests can get to it, they must run a gantlet of silly questions from the rest of the family members. NBC is casting the family as Mexican Americans to make them more relatable to the U.S. audience.

A less-rigid system

Going into the 1980s, British television was as regimented as the U.S. system, executives say. The success of American import “Dallas” on the commercial ITV network (the BBC is commercial-free and paid for by a TV-set tax, was a wake-up call at the BBC, says Paul Lee, the chief executive officer of BBC America.

So the British started mixing things up. Taking a cue from the Fox network’s “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted,” they added dramatic arcs and music and suspense to rev up inexpensive “reality” video, says Alan Yentob, the BBC’s director of drama, entertainment and children’s programming. A whole genre of what the Brits call “documentary soaps” followed, turning the cameras on life in an airport, a hotel, even on that dreaded British rite of passage, driving school. Soon, drama and comedy reversed the process and were stealing techniques from “reality” programming.

British TV executives attribute some of their recent success to a less rigid development process than the American counterpart. “Dog Eat Dog” went through three pilots to find the right formula. Series often start out on one of the BBC’s lesser channels, where they can be tinkered with before moving to BBC1 if they are a success. That technique allowed “The Weakest Link” to be nurtured into a huge hit. “It was matured like a cheese,” Jarvis says. “In your market, you wind up the clock and set it running even on Day One.”

The BBC also has BBC America as a testing ground. Even though it’s hard for many TV watchers to find it, it has proven useful for executives to assess what will work in the U.S.

The BBC’s public status also gives it a freedom not unlike that of HBO, according to Lee, who says ad-sales-driven networks must keep viewers happy every three minutes or viewers will turn away. HBO and the BBC have time to find something to please viewers. “There’s a long-term sense of value,” he says, which allows more risk-taking.

The greater flexibility in the British system has yielded unexpected creative results too. The BBC’s Young started the daytime drama anthology series “The Doctors,” in 2000, that has become a sought-after outlet for actors and writers during their down time, and has allowed him to develop new talent. Meanwhile, “The Office” started life as a drama, Young says, except it didn’t quite work as one, so it was reconceptualized as a comedy. Not only that, but the creators were not television people. In the U.S., BBC Worldwide’s Gavin says, “there is no way you would get away with an unknown writer saying, ‘That’s what I want to do,’ ” which is how “The Office” came to be. And such an offbeat mix of reality and comedy, he says, “would be homogenized out.”

NBC’s Zucker agrees. “They take risks both on camera and behind the scenes that we mistakenly don’t have the guts to do. We are way too beholden to people we know and people who have done it before.”

But changing the U.S. system is hard, he says. “It’s an embedded system that is difficult to change, but it would behoove all of us to do so.”

The obvious advantages of shared language have led Americans to mine British TV for ideas going back to “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son,” and some of the new imports are sure to work. Satellite, mobile phones and the Internet have made the cultures even closer, Yentob says. “Things are traveling now. It’s a smaller world.”

In a development that may make the world smaller still, a new British law is expected to open up the private side of Britain’s TV business to limited U.S. investment next spring, and already several U.S. companies have started sniffing around.

But just how far U.S. audiences are willing to play along is up for debate. A no-laugh-track British comedy, “The Royle Family,” which featured a lower-middle-class family sitting on the couch watching TV and unspooled in real time, was a huge hit in the U.K. and did well on BBC America, but never made it past the pilot stage last season at CBS.

Shows such as “The Office” are a big challenge, says Lloyd Braun, chairman of ABC Entertainment. “You really have to retrain the audience,” he says, citing the difficulties of even a show like ABC’s “Sports Night,” whose totally different rhythms attracted only a limited, if loyal, audience. “It can’t be so different that it’s alienating. Sometimes baby steps are better.”

Grit rules

Some U.S. executives think the appeal of British programming will remain limited to reality shows and will always be just a small niche. “The Europeans got better at reality because they couldn’t afford the big budgets,” says Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting System, who oversees the WB network. He adds, “I don’t think it will become a big portion of anybody’s schedule. There are things the American public knows they like and we need to find ways to give them that.”

Indeed, there remain major differences in taste between the two cultures. Brits like real-life dramas, so “Big Brother” did better in the U.K. than it has in the U.S., where “Survivor” fares better, thanks to Americans’ preference for fantasy.

“The American audience likes aspirational stuff. Here, people want to see themselves,” Young says. “We love the gritty.”

British TV executives are still pinching themselves at the turnabout in trade relations, although not everyone is convinced that British television is so innovative.

Mark Thompson, a former BBC executive who recently took over as head of Britain’s commercial Channel Four, in August used the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh’s International Television Festival to lash out at what he called the risk-averse British television culture, which he said leads to shows that are “dull, mechanical and samey.” Real creativity, he said, was coming out of the U.S., with Fox’s “24,” HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and MTV’s “Jackass.” Critics have complained about the Brits’ chase after ratings at the expense of quality. Ex-pat British journalist Andrew Sullivan recently complained in the New Republic about the cultural coarsening of America thanks to all the British reality imports..

Indeed, a quick flip through the British TV dial turns up quirky documentaries such as a history of London’s sewer system, but also just as much derivative fare as in the U.S. Personal make-over shows abound. “Popstars” and “Pop Idol” have spawned numerous copycats. Channel Four just announced an operatic version of “Pop Idol” called “Operatunity” and a new series in which housewives swap homes, the logical extension of “Changing Rooms.”

Sometimes, says the BBC’s Yentob, “you want to say ‘enough already,’ ” although he notes that audiences also turned out in huge numbers for a recent BBC documentary on the building of a pyramid. It drew a 34% share of those watching TV, something even top series in the U.S. don’t often do.

How long the trade deficit will run in favor of Britain remains a hot debate. The window of opportunity for British television will be short, thinks David Liddiment, the outgoing director of programs for Britain’s ITV network and the man who put “Millionaire” on the air. Speaking at a recent international television conference in Cannes, France, he said, “The American television business is very competitive. We will see the Americans coming through strong. Americans are not going to sit back and allow the Europeans to dominate this market.”

For his part, Turner’s Kellner maintains that when all is said and done, “the reliable system is the Hollywood system.”

But BBC Worldwide’s Jarvis doesn’t buy that, and from his perch in London, he says that not only is the British TV community ready to take on the Americans, but “on the basis of shows traveling from this side of the ocean to yours, we even seem to be a little better at it.”