The Changing Face of International TV

An orange taxi cruised the boulevard alongside the shimmering Mediterranean during the recent international television market here known as MIPCOM. It was Austria’s answer to the “Big Brother” phenomenon, with a little bit of HBO’s racy “Taxicab Confessions” thrown in.

In the hit show “Taxi Orange,” seven men and six women live in the by-now obligatory TV camera-rigged house for 77 days, but in a twist, they must run a four-car taxi service--equipped with taxi-cams, of course--whose income is their only food money.

Inside convention central--a multilevel building squeezed in between a beach and the port for the yachts favored by some companies for closing deals--is what amounts to a worldwide flea market for television shows, where deals are brokered through the haze of cigarette smoke and nearly everyone breaks for a civilized two-hour lunch. There, “Taxi Orange” represents part of a remarkable transfer of power. Where once the U.S. held a virtual programming stranglehold over what fills the television airwaves of the world, that grip has been loosenedby the most unlikely of foes--cheaply produced, reality shows with little need of actors or writers.

There is a series of forces fueling the change, from governments that now require more local programming to the changing tastes of audiences--both in the U.S. and elsewhere--who simply like, at least for the moment, the shows coming from beyond our borders. Next year’s looming Hollywood strike by writers and actors, meanwhile, has given a boost to these primarily European reality formats, as networks scramble to find shows that could temporarily replace comedies and dramas.

On the convention hall’s downstairs floor, a Dutch duo with no TV experience were pitching their own “Big Brother” variation, “Euro Babylon,” pitting teams from 15 European Union countries in a picture-perfect turreted French castle for 119 days. “Let’s see an Englishman make a cup of coffee for an Italian,” hustled format (and castle) owner Maarten J. Lamers, who insisted similar clashes between residents of different American states would prove equally compelling.

Upstairs, the official “Big Brother” producer, Spanish-owned Dutch company Endemol, had its own ideas for capitalizing on the reality television phenomenon it helped to set off, including “Big Brother VIPs.” This version would hinge on convincing celebrities to participate in the no-privacy “Big Brother” house, depriving them of makeup artists and all. Another Endemol variation, “Big Brother--the Comedy,” seemed to defeat the purpose of the original voyeuristic show--consisting of outrageous and larger-than-life house inhabitants, all played by actors using an informal script.

Smashing Privacy Is Today’s Concept

Despite cultural differences among countries of the world, at least one characteristic remains constant across borders: the urge to rush out copy-cat programs whenever a new television concept makes it big, and on MIPCOM’s prized sun-flooded balconies for conducting business while sipping tiny French coffees, “Big Brother” and other privacy-intrusive shows were the concept of the moment to rip off.

More important, their ability to be adapted to different countries, allowing for changes to appeal more directly to each specific audience, is fueling a trend that has caught the attention of the world’s television producers. Indeed, program formats--as opposed to reruns of existing shows such as “ER” and “Melrose Place”--are the rage in world television circles at the moment. That’s due to the success in the past year of, among others, “Big Brother,” “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” “Survivor” and “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”--all European concepts that have been adapted successfully to various cultures.

For years, the world television market has consisted largely of sales of existing programs, already shown in their home countries. Dominating this scene are the major U.S. studios such as Warner Bros. and Universal, which bundle their blockbuster movies and hit series such as “Friends,” along with less stellar films and the six-episode television flops into what are known as “output deals.” Those deals, which commit foreign broadcasters to take the good along with the bad, remain a huge part of the overall market. In 1999, according to Paul Kagan Associates, international licensing of U.S.-produced programming generated $6.6 billion, up 10% from a year earlier.

Although British Broadcasting Corp. programming found a home on PBS or one of the cable channels, and British sitcoms and dramas occasionally got adapted into such American series as “All in the Family” or “Cracker,” for the most part the business in the past was in the other direction: The world bought from the Americans, whose imposing booths, with pit-bull receptionists, dominate the nearly 500 exhibitors the MIPCOM convention center and at the Spring version, known as MIP.

But European broadcasters long dependent on Hollywood imports have been increasingly under pressure in recent years to come up with original prime time series of their own. Not only have European governments imposed quotas mandating a certain percentage of locally grown shows, but audiences are demanding--voting with their remote controls--their own local programs, in place of months-or even years-late American reruns.

As a result, foreign broadcasters are attempting some odd hybrids: A Swedish network is teaming up with an American producer to make a soap, in Swedish, about life in Miami Beach, for one. And shows such as Nickelodeon’s “Blue’s Clues,” a mix of animation and a live-action host, are being adapted with local hosts in such far-flung places as Korea, turning them essentially into local shows.

But with less programming development money than their American counterparts, many foreign broadcasters also “tend to take more risks,” says Greg Lipstone, senior vice president and head of creative development at the William Morris Agency, which represents “Millionaire” and “Big Brother,” among others. “When you are constrained by budgets, you figure out ways to make things work. That’s what bred many of these innovative programs.”

And when a show succeeds or breaks new ground elsewhere in the world, chances are increasing that it will get broader distribution and also land in some form in the U.S. CBS-owned King World International Productions, whose “Wheel of Fortune” has been a worldwide format hit for 18 years, just snapped up Israel’s top-rated game show, “The Vault,” to distribute worldwide. Meanwhile, the big U.S. networks, facing the threat of actors and writers strikes next year, sent executives to MIPCOM to scout projects and have put out the word that they intend to stock up on inexpensive reality formats that can be rushed into production to fill a potential sitcom and drama void.

Melding Genres Isn’t Really New

Although the “Survivor”-style shows and a rash of variations to come--from “The Big Diet” (dieters are tempted by their favorite foods) to “The Mole” (a team must accomplish a challenge, despite the presence of a secret traitor in their midst)--have garnered much of the ink, European broadcasters have been reinventing storytelling forms for the past five years, says Jana Bennett, general manager of cable’s Learning Channel and former director of programs for the British Broadcasting Corp.

That’s when they began melding genres, with lifestyle programming borrowing entertainment techniques and drama borrowing from documentary. “Viewers don’t classify like broadcasters do,” she said.

Taking the how-to show out of its straitjacket of earnestness and clear, concise instructions, TLC just launched “Trading Spaces,” an Americanized version of Britain’s popular “Changing Rooms.” The program, which TLC picked up at MIPCOM last year, is a home decorating show with a not-always-so-nice twist: The neighbors get to do the redecorating for willing participants and even the help of a professional doesn’t always guarantee stellar results. Bennett says TLC had to convince the American producers, used to the more traditional how-to shows, to loosen up, that if a picture fell off the wall, the segment shouldn’t be re-shot for perfection. “We’ve had to deprogram people to be unscripted,” she says.

January brings the debut of another retooled import: “Junkyard Wars,” a variation on the British “Scrapheap Challenge,” where teams of handymen and women (“sometimes a bit nerdy,” Bennett says) compete on technologically difficult projects--say, building a catapult.

Both of the original British productions can also be seen in the U.S., “Scrapheap Challenge” (renamed “Junkyard Wars”) on TLC and “Changing Rooms” on the BBC America channel. Indeed, the voracious appetite for programs worldwide, as technology advances and channels proliferate, has made any show with a halo of success ripe for picking off--in multiple forms. “Survivor” started life as a European show, but once it became an American hit, it took on yet another life. Thanks to the border-transcending capabilities of the Internet, the show provoked such interest elsewhere in the world that CBS was selling reruns of the American version at MIPCOM to a number of countries. One was Australia, which is also producing its own version of the program, not to be confused with a second round of the American version, for CBS, that is being shot in Australia.

U.S. Studios Seek a New Strategy

Television tastes tend to go in cycles, and some executives remain wary that the trend will last, noting that much depends on the quality of the big-budget series coming out of the U.S. Still, with home-grown shows breaking through on their own country’s ratings charts, the big U.S. studios have been trying to figure out a strategy to retain that piece of the pie. For several years, co-productions were seen as the solution. Under that arrangement, studios teamed with foreign producers on series and made-for-TV movies that were usually shot in English, but with casts that had celebrity value in both territories, and production crews that could satisfy foreign quota requirements. More recently, Warner Bros., for one, has fully embraced local producers in France and Germany, simply retaining distribution rights to some of their shows.

Of course, much of what the world has to offer in the way of television simply wouldn’t cut it in the U.S. The offerings are eclectic, from the Vatican Television Center’s six documentaries on Pope John Paul II to “Overland, World Truck Expedition,” an award-winning show following adventurers as they embark on, for one, a 40,000-kilometer ride from Philadelphia to Sao Paolo, Brazil. On the MIPCOM floor, sleepy broadcasts of national orchestra concerts vie for attention with Japanese porn, endless children’s animation and numerous shows about the world of animals.

And the reality shows keep coming. Endemol boasted everything from “Flatmate,” promising a month’s free rent in exchange for potential roommates undergoing on-camera scrutiny by existing tenants, to “The Box of Love,” which records the reaction as people who have established a relationship by e-mail meet in person for the first time--in the dark, as infrared cameras watch them feel each other out (they later get to pick each other out of a lineup.)

Hoping to become the next “Millionaire” were everything from “The Vault,” in which players must negotiate as well as prove knowledgeable to the King World-distributed call-in Croatian game show, “Take the Money and Run,” which can be produced for less than $400 an episode from production effects on a floppy disk. It is garnering interest in such markets as Eastern Europe and Latin America, but not in the U.S.--at least yet.