Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic

3 - It’s All in a Game: Television Formats in the People’s Republic of China

To Alienate or Homogenate? Imagine if extraterrestrials were to land on planet Earth to conduct a factfinding tour. One of the first tasks of the aliens would be to understand how earthlings communicate ideas. They would quickly note the centrality of terrestrial television, and after analysing the signals they might justifiably conclude that the content distributed across the spectrum reflected a degree of homogeneity across cultural and linguistic communities. They might also surmise that earthlings were a species that delighted in primitive contests of chance and elimination. Similarity in global television programming, however, is not hypothetical. A native of Korea might make similar observations about television programmes upon visiting Singapore, as might an Inuit in Sichuan, or a Belgian in Rome. The fact that people engage in contests of all types and levels of difficulty is likewise unsurprising, as is the transference of varieties of competitive rituals to the small screen. As anthropologists and psychologists reach for their notebooks in anticipation, television producers rush to count ratings. The more television globalises, the more it appears the same. This seems like a useful proposition. But how true is it? Television programme convergence is a result of increasing multi-channel capacity and rapid turnover in concept life cycles. Moreover, the process of globalising ritual anticipates cultural connection within and across nations. The global village, a cliché that becomes more meaningful each day, is evident 3 It’s All in a Game: Television Formats in the People’s Republic of China Michael Keane 54 Michael Keane not just in the sense of instantaneous information made available by the Internet but in the similarity of entertainment content. Now global village people, we share in the recognition that television entertainment is formula driven, international in its distribution, and subject to rapid obsolesce. In addition, we sense that genres are cross-dressing due to a need to devise new formulas to satisfy multi-channel demand and audiences that want that extra dimension of titillation. In this chapter, I discuss the phenomenon of convergence of game and quiz shows in the East Asian region. I describe the development of television formats in East Asia and illustrate how the process of formatting has taken hold in the People’s Republic of China, a country where political formatting of culture has been displaced by earnest audience participation. Against a legacy of social conformity, game shows of all hues have taken root, filling prime-time schedules and causing traditionalists to claim the end of quality programming. However, while the increasingly modularity of entertainment television genres reflects a desire on the part of producers to produce content that is cheap and meaningful, it is also a direct result of the internationalisation of production led by dedicated format providers. Television formats, as such, are an important factor in the trend that sees game shows refashioned into modular hybrid forms, and documentary forms re-imagined as game formats. The format is also the vehicle for the transfer of programming ideas within and across national television systems. Genres in Flux Quiz and game shows, long seen as staple requirements of afternoon and early evening programming scheduling, now employ hybrid formats, increasingly merging light entertainment with what can be broadly defined as popular factual television programming (Roscoe 2001). In effect, the merging of the factual with the comfortably familiar presumes increasing feedback between producers and viewers. Not only do people watch such programmes at different times from what they did previously, but according to Jane Roscoe a shift towards lightness of subject matter in factual forms brings a different process of mediation between text and viewer: the text embodies factual elements but at the same time asks the viewer to engage with his or her imagination in order to understand characters and their experiences (12). John Corner (2000) notes the repositioning of the viewer more as an amused bystander regarding the ‘mixture and mess and routine’ in others’ lives (Corner 2002, 3; cited in Roscoe 2001, 11). He argues that ‘reality game shows’ are It’s All in a Game: Television Formats in the People’s Republic of China 55 the latest stage in the transformation of factual television, from basic reality television formats (Funniest Home Videos), to docu-soap (Popstars), to reality game shows (Survivor, Big Brother, Temptation Island, etc.). Such programmes are now ubiquitous in global television schedules, so much so that the appearance of the latest variant often provokes muted...