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Despite great heterogeneity, the vast continent of Africa and the diverse people of its countries and diasporas have often been represented through the most reductive, essentialising, and denigrating paradigms— a process that Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi has referred to as “the danger of a single story”. One of the most dangerous of these paradigms is the developmentalist one, which shoehorns Africa into a western, capitalist teleological framework that overlooks and denies Africa’s production of and participation in forms of leisure, pleasure and entertainment.

Television Drama in Spain and Latin America addresses two major topics within current cultural, media, and television studies: the question of fictional genres and that of transnational circulation. While much research has been carried out on both TV formats and remakes in the English-speaking world, almost nothing has been published on the huge and dynamic Spanish-speaking sector. This book discusses and analyses series since 2000 from Spain (in both Spanish and Catalan), Mexico, Venezuela, and (to a lesser extent) the US, employing both empirical research on production and distribution and textual analysis of content. The three genres examined are horror, biographical series, and sports-themed dramas; the three examples of format remakes are of a period mystery (Spain, Mexico), a romantic comedy (Venezuela, US), and a historical epic (Catalonia, Spain). Paul Julian Smith is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was previously Professor of Spanish at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of twenty books and one hundred academic articles.

This book examines the process of transnationalization of Latin American television industries. Drawing upon six representative case studies spanning the subcontinent’s vast and diverse geo-political and cultural landscape, the book offers a unique exploration of the ongoing formation of interrelated cultural, technological, and political landscapes, from the mid-1980s to the present. The chapters analyse the international circulation of the genres and formats of entertainment television across the subcontinent to explore the main driving forces propelling the production and consumption of television contents in the region, and what we can learn about the cultural and social identities of Latin American audiences following the journey of genres, formats, and media personalities beyond their own national borders. Taking a contemporary interdisciplinary approach to the study of transnational television industries, this book will be of significant interest to scholars and students of television and film studies, communication studies, Latin American studies, global media studies, and media and cultural industries.

In 1980, Hong Kong’s commercial Television Broadcast Limited (TVB) television drama The Bund ( 上海滩 ) was popularly received in the city as well as in South-East Asia and the broader Chinese diaspora. Set in the cosmopolitan treaty port of Shanghai in the 1920s, The Bund revolves around the violent ascent of a coolie (Ray Lui) and a disillusioned student activist (Chow Yun-Fat) to become prominent mobsters. Not only were two sequels made within that year, but this historical gangster drama has been repeatedly resurrected in television dramas and fi lms, including Chow’s redux, The Last Tycoon ( 大上海 ), three decades later in 2012. From karaoke lounges to social media sites, theme songs of The Bund remain popular more than three decades after the dramas were screened . With music composed by Joseph Koo, lyrics by Wong Jim and sung by Frances Yip, the main and supplementary theme songs refl ected the intimate role of the Hong Kong-based contemporary Cantonese popular music, or Canto-pop, in cultivating a more memorable and enduring televisual culture. With the smooth synchronization of Koo’s classical music with the undulating pitch of Yip, the song articulates the unpredictable tribulations of the changing fortunes in the treaty-port of Shanghai in the interwar years. To a certain extent, it is also a narrative that reminds viewers in Hong Kong and beyond of similar socio-political and historical predicaments.

This chapter looks at one well-known format in reality television– Big Brother (Bigg Boss in India) – in order to shed light on the complicated relationship between the forces of globalization, national and local cultural formations and the dictates of commercially driven entertainment. It analyses the essential features of format television to argue that the very mode of its constitution as an economic and aesthetic object inclines it towards the global. The chapter elucidates the reality behind global cultural formations by discussing the two main theoretical approaches to the question of global culture – cultural imperialism and cultural globalization. It also offers some speculations about how reality television embodies global form and thus functions as a sort of “Bigg Boss” that dictates contemporary modes of meaningful behaviour.

As a trend that captured the imagination of Brazilian audiences, the rapid proliferation of dance competitions on network television is meaningful not simply as a domestic phenomenon but also, and particularly, as an illustration of the mechanisms that enable the global popularity of formatted programs. While the shows were locally produced and relied on local talent, they were all based on formats that originated elsewhere, “imported ideas” that were recycled by Brazilian producers. References to foreign versions of the formats were also part of the discourses through which the domestic adaptations were described. As one show followed the other, they invited comparisons not only among themselves but also with their international counterparts. Yet, despite the association with foreign TV shows, the formats were easily incorporated to Brazil’s television culture, a feat that could surprise neither critics nor the industry.

I was about 10 or 11 years old when I, together with my parents, religiously tuned in weekly to the situation comedy ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? While I do not recall the specific year the show aired in Puerto Rico, I do remember that it was broadcast on WIPR-Channel 6, the island’s public television station. Watching one of my favorite sitcoms on what I then considered the boring channel was rather odd. However, I never thought it strange that the Peñas, ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? ’s working-class three-generation Cuban/Cuban-American family, resided in Miami or that some of the characters communicated bilingually in English and Spanish. For me, ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? was a show that resembled other locally produced situation comedies broadcast on commercial television, with the difference that the Peña family were Cuban immigrants who, instead of residing in Puerto Rico (like some of my childhood friends), lived in Miami (like many of my friends’ relatives). Probably as a result of the principal characters’ cultural references and their accents in Spanish, I decoded ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? as a Cuban sitcom. Fast-forward to 2004. I was invited to write a 500-word encyclopedia entry on ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? Without having any information on the show at hand, I immediately accepted. This was an opportunity to revisit a program I loved. After conducting the research I realized the uniqueness of ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? Sponsored by the U.S. Office of Education Emergency School Assistance Act– Television Program (ESAA-TV), ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? —considered the first bilingual situation comedy broadcast on U.S. television— addressed the culturalgenerational misunderstandings and the socio-cultural adjustments endured by the Peñas, a 1960 Cuban exile family.

The worldwide success of the Idol format may not require any explanation. We live under the ubiquitous sign of globalization; and hence it should come as no surprise that mass media— which together constitute an ecumenical vehicle of culture with an insatiable appetite for profit— would generate forms (or formats) of art that travel with ease and are translatable into every context. The reception of these formats is, at one level, as unproblematic as its dissemination. To be global (and who isn’t?) is to be eagerly accepting of certain languages, technologies, discourses and styles. The craze surrounding competitive singing can then be explained as one more instance of borders proving permeable to the formulas of international popular culture. It is my argument that in order to understand the unique valence and significance of global formats, we need to go beyond issues of production, distribution and reception, and focus instead on the phenomena that arise from their instantiation . This is so because implementing a format in a specific context has consequences that are neither written into the “program” nor purely derivable from local conditions. Let me provide an illustration. The call-in talk show has recently become a staple on Indian television. The format and content of these shows would be familiar to most Western viewers— a regular host, one or more “experts” discussing politics and culture, and a final segment devoted to phone calls from the public.

In this chapter, we argue that there are several layers of genre, proto-format commercialization of program elements, and current commercially licensed formats. Some genre traditions, like melodrama, tend to be large, over-arching categories that already have a long history before television (Martín-Barbero 1993). Specific genres of television production, like the U.S. soap opera or the Latin American telenovela can develop within that larger tradition. Even more specific genres, like the Brazilian socially engaged or historical telenovelas, versus the romantic Mexican Cinderella story telenovela (Hernandez 2001), develop or emerge over time within those genre traditions. Television formats are now often distinguished as a parallel category which looks at forms of television that are packaged for licensing, transfer across cultures, and localized adaptation or implementation by regional, national or local networks. Specific formats are often imported and adopted. They can feed into genre development, grafted on to older traditions.

This chapter analyses a profound transformation of Bengali regional-languagecinema since the early 1980s, a transformation that fundamentally changedthe industry and one that can arguably be attributed at least partly to thecreation of a Bengali television-watching public in the same period. Itfocuses on a trend that emerged in mainstream Bengali cinema during the1980s and was sustained thereafter, and brought into prominence a newconfiguration of elements previously marginal to Bengali films. This trans-formation was to do with mainstream Bengali cinema’s increasing adaptation of what are commonly known as the ‘‘masala’’ or ‘‘formula’’ elementsof Bombay cinema such as racy dialogues, stereotypical villainous char-acters, stylized fights and song-and-dance sequences. This new genre, whichhas commonly been discredited as the Bengali film industry’s totally unim-aginative imitation of the popular Hindi-language cinema of Bombay,completely altered what had been the dominant aesthetic of Bengali cinematill about the mid-1970s. Until this point, Bengali cinema was marked by itsclose relationship with Bengali literature and a Bengali middle-class worldview, greater realism than Bombay cinema or other mainstream regionalcinemas, and naturalistic acting styles, and was radically transformed by agrowing adoption of the ‘‘formula’’ elements commonly identified withpopular Hindi cinema. Industry sources, however, indicate that this newtrend was successful in boosting the Bengali film industry, which had beenswamped by a severe economic crisis since the 1970s. The industry’s crisiswas caused by a host of factors: the most important of these was the Ben-gali middle-class audience’s shift to television as a result of an increasingly unsatisfactory film-going experience in this period. The creation of a Ben-gali television public in the early 1980s shifted audiences from the cinematheatres, thereby significantly reducing film revenues in Calcutta, until then the prime market for Bengali films.

This volume is divided into three parts: 'Adaptation and Local Production in East Asia', 'Formats, Clones, and Generic Variations' and 'New Television'.

This volume presents a series of papers concerned with the interrelations between the postmodern and the present state of art and design education. Spanning a range of thematic concerns, the book reflects upon existing practice and articulates revolutionary prospects potentially viable through a shift in educative thinking.

Hong Kong is famous internationally as a financial market, a shopping paradise, and Chinese film production hub, but notoriously (and perhaps even attractively for some) Hong Kong is also a hotbed of piracy of computer software, DVDs, watches and toys.1 While many cultural products such as television dramas and movies are original and quite reputable in the region, media critics argue that the copycat phenomenon, which includes borrowing, inserting and modifying other cultural texts to augment local production, is common in the media and entertainment industries (Fung 1998). Whenever a new form, style, or popular culture trend emerges in Hong Kong, market forces soon kick in to replicate it. However, this kind of reproduction, as shown by the history of cultural production in Hong Kong, does not necessarily lead to a degradation of programme quality. Reproduction is not only a savvy strategy to reduce the financial risks inherent to new products, but also aims at producing ‘improved’ versions which can reap more profits for the industry.

Unlike smaller nation-states in this study the People’s Republic of China has never really countenanced a scarcity of domestic television content. Supply has been constant, indicating both the importance and the sheer size of the sector. The nationalized broadcast media has for several decades churned out cheaply produced films, documentaries, dramas, and news programmes. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, audience demand for domestic content began to wane as more as more international programmes found their way into schedules, particularly in southern China. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001 seemed to herald soul-searching among its media mandarins. What would happen? Would China be inundated by foreign content (the worst case scenario) or would China, as it has done over time, absorb and regulate foreign influences?

The previous chapter introduced in broad brushstrokes the issues at stake in this study, beginning with a critique of globalization and moving on to sketch in finer detail national television systems, the role of local content, and the economic importance of formats. The chapter concluded with a brief overview of the vagaries of copyright law as it applies to formats. Here, we initiate a discussion of Asian television systems beginning with a much different perspective on the ramifications of cultural borrowing. In this context we note that the format business straddles the divide between creative endeavour and innovation on the one hand, and slavish imitation on the other. This polarization manifests in widespread misunderstanding of the goals of format producers and distributors, and the role that formats play in the shaping of television schedules. We need therefore to flesh out the in-between issues. These are primarily concerned with the relationship between the format and its localization, television consumption within ‘cultural continents’, and changes in media systems. Taking this further we note the relationship between production and reception within Asia, the growth of television industries in the region and the relationship between formatting and new media distribution platforms that use interactive technologies allowing viewers to feedback responses. This exercise enables us to identify an alternative list of conceptual tools to those championed by political economy scholars.

Taiwan residents enjoy one of the most abundant television diets in East Asia. Eighty per cent of households subscribe to cable television services, offering a buffet of more than eighty channels including niche and full service channels. Taiwan’s television industry, while relatively small in comparison with its competitors in East Asia, has established a reputation for creatively re-generating formats developed elsewhere.

In the eyes of many observers the Philippine cultural icon that is synonymous with travel, as well as being the subject of numerous advertisements is the jeepney, a public-transport vehicle assembled in the style of the US military jeep but lengthened to accommodate from fourteen to twenty-two sitting passengers. What distinguishes the jeepney from run-of-the-mill public transport however is its artistic décor: a clutter and kaleidoscope of various artefacts from miniature steel horses dotting the hood, to massive, jazzy plastic or steel billboards announcing the name of the jeepney, to murals painted in fiesta colours at the sides, to a bizarre combination of items in the front windshield juxtaposing conflicting images of the Sto. Nino (the baby Jesus Christ) and stickers with sexually risqué messages.

Television programme format adaptation is becoming an increasingly significant phenomenon in India as it is in many other countries with an active domestic television industry. Some obvious successes stand out in recent years, such as Kaun Banega Crorepati, the licensed adaptation of Celador’s global format success Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, and C.A.T.S., a licensed Hindi version of the US detective series Charlie’s Angels. However, sensitivity to local cultural nuances has been critical to their popular reception by Indian audiences. Yet despite a few high-profile licensed adaptations or copycatting, there are far more instances of unlicensed adaptations or cloning, sometimes subtle, other times not.