A reporter for the Los Angeles Times once noted that “I Love Lucy is said to be on the air somewhere in the world 24 hours a day.” That Lucy’s madcap antics can be watched anywhere at any time is thanks to television syndication, a booming global marketplace that imports and exports TV shows. Programs from different countries are packaged, bought, and sold all over the world, under the watch of an industry that is extraordinarily lucrative for major studios and production companies. In Global TV, Denise D. Bielb and C. Lee Harrington seek to understand the machinery of this marketplace, its origins and history, its inner workings, and its product management. In so doing, they are led to explore the cultural significance of this global trade, and to ask how it is so remarkably successful despite the inherent cultural differences between shows and local audiences. How do culture-specific genres like American soap operas and Latin telenovelas so easily cross borders and adapt to new cultural surroundings? Why is The Nanny, whose gum-chewing star is from Queens, New York, a smash in Italy? Importantly, Bielby and Harrington also ask which kinds of shows fail. What is lost in translation? Considering such factors as censorship and other such state-specific policies, what are the inevitable constraints of crossing over? Highly experienced in the field, Bielby and Harrington provide a unique and richly textured look at global television through a cultural lens, one that has an undeniable and complex effect on what shows succeed and which do not on an international scale.

Recent years have seen an astonishing growth in the adaptation of program formats in television systems across the world. Under the new market conditions of the multi-channel cluster brought about by new technologies and increased privatization of service, the adaptation of successful and popular TV formats from one place to another is occurring on an increasingly regular basis. Hence, the remaking of different national versions of Big Brother and Pop Idol are only part of what is going on. In fact, from Chinese versions of Coronation Street and Sex and the City, Indian and Indonesian remakes of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, program clones of Ground Force and other make-over and renovation shows across Europe and the UK, the present is the era of the global TV format. But what exactly is a format? After all, programs have been copied and imitated since the beginnings of broadcasting. In this, the first book in the English language to systematically deal with the subject, Albert Moran and Justin Malbon provide a valuable guide to the institutional, cultural and legal dimensions of the format. Now widely referred to although equally often misunderstood, the TV format is a commodity of production, finance, distribution, broadcasting and marketing knowledges, that is facilitating the international reconfiguration of program making. Understanding the Global TV Format thus addresses the different stages and issues of the business. It tracks the steps whereby formats are devised, developed and distributed. Major companies are profiled as are the international markets and festivals at which trade occurs. However, there is also a great deal of piracy taking place so that the book is concerned with the control and regulation of format remaking. Legal protection is often both the first and last recourse of parties and the authors examine the relevance of laws relating to such matters as copyright and contract.

Exploring the relationship between the growth of global media and Cold War tensions and resolutions

The Horror genre has become one of the most popular genres of TV drama with the global success and fandom surrounding The Walking Dead, Supernatural and Stranger Things. Horror has always had a truly international reach, and nowhere is this more apparent than on television as explored in this provocative new collection looking at series from across the globe, and considering how Horror manifests in different cultural and broadcast/streaming contexts. Bringing together established scholars and new voices in the field, Global TV Horror examines historical and contemporary TV Horror from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Iran, Japan, Spain, New Zealand, USA and the UK. It expands the discussion of TV Horror by offering fresh perspectives, examining new shows, and excavating new cultural histories, to render what has become so familiar – Horror on television – unfamiliar yet again.

Winning the Global TV News Game (1995) examines the worldwide TV news revolution of the 1990s, dealing with live TV news as an industry–consumer relationship. It’s a marketing approach – focusing on regional markets across the globe, looking at industry players and the hardware they had put in place. Much of this analysis is told by leading news media professionals who describe the latest thinking and newest developments in their own words.

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.

Featuring scholarly perspectives from around the globe and drawing on a legacy of television studies, but with an eye toward the future, this authoritative collection examines both the thoroughly global nature of television and the multiple and varied experiences that constitute television in the twenty-first century. Companion chapters include original essays by some of the leading scholars of television studies as well as emerging voices engaging television on six continents, offering readers a truly global range of perspectives. The volume features multidisciplinary analyses that offer models and guides for the study of global television, with approaches focused on the theories, audiences, content, culture, and institutions of television. A wide array of examples and case studies engage the transforming practices, technologies, systems, and texts constituing television around the world today, providing readers with a contemporary and multi-faceted perspective. In this volume, editor Shawn Shimpach has brought together an essential guide to understanding television in the world today, how it works and what it means – perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in television, global media studies, and beyond.