Global Television Formats

Book description

Winner of the 2013 SCMS Best Edited Collection Award

For decades, television scholars have viewed global television through the lens of cultural imperialism, focusing primarily on programs produced by US and UK markets and exported to foreign markets. Global Television Formats revolutionizes television studies by de-provincializing its approach to media globalization. It re-examines dominant approaches and their legacies of global/local and center/periphery, and offers new directions for understanding television’s contemporary incarnations.

The chapters in this collection take up the format phenomena from around the globe, including 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. 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. Looking to global television formats as vital for various cultural meanings, relationships, and structures, this collection shows how formats can further our understanding of television and the culture of globalization at large.

Table of contents

  1. Front Cover
  2. Global Television Formats
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. List of Contributors
  8. Acknowledgements
  9. Introduction: Television Formats—A Global Framework for TV Studies
  10. Part I Format Theories and Global Television
    1. 1 More than Copycat Television: Format Adaptation as Performance
    2. 2 “Calling Out Around the World”: The Global Appeal of Reality Dance Formats
    3. 3 Television Formats and Contemporary Sport
    4. 4 A Political Economy of Formatted Pleasures
    5. 5 Interpreting Cubanness, Americanness, and the Sitcom: WPBT-PBS's ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? (1975–1980)
  11. Part II Transnational Formats: Historical Perspectives
    1. 6 From Discrete Adaptations to Hard Copies: The Rise of Formats in European Television
    2. 7 “National Mike”: Global Host and Global Formats in Early Italian Television
    3. 8 Telenovelas in Brazil: From Traveling Scripts to a Genre and Proto-Format both National and Transnational
    4. 9 Reversal of Fortune? Hollywood Faces New Competition in Global Media Trade
  12. Part III Case Study: The Idol Franchise
    1. 10 Idol Worship: Ethnicity and Difference in Global Television
    2. 11 NZ Idol: Nation Building Through Format Adaptation
    3. 12 Global Television Formats in Africa: Localizing Idol
    4. 13 We Are the World: American Idol’s Global Self-Posturing
  13. Part IV Trans-Formats: Local Articulations and the Politics of Place and Nation
    1. 14 The Social and Political Dimensions of Global Television Formats: Reality Television in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia
    2. 15 A Revolution in Television and a Great Leap Forward for Innovation? China in the Global Television Format Business
    3. 16 Global Television Formats and the Political Economy of Cultural Adaptation: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in India
    4. 17 Global Franchising, Gender, and Genre: The Case of Domestic Reality Television
    5. 18 Reiterational Texts and Global Imagination: Television Strikes Back
  14. Index

Product information

  • Title: Global Television Formats
  • Author(s): Sharon Shahaf, Tasha Oren
  • Release date: June 2013
  • Publisher(s): Routledge
  • ISBN: 9781135889500