Malcolm Reeves: Cole, long week — you holding up?
Cole Brennan: Honestly, yeah — I watched like three different versions of the same show back to back for this, so I'm a little — I don't know, my brain is doing something weird.
Malcolm Reeves: That's actually a good place to start. Because what you were watching — those weren't translations or dubbed copies. They were legally distinct productions, each one built from scratch. That's the thing we're into today.
Cole Brennan: TV format adaptation — and honestly, the more I sat with it, the stranger it got.
Malcolm Reeves: Here's the core of it. A format isn't the show — it's the architecture underneath the show. Premise, episode structure, rules, visual grammar, casting functions. You license the blueprint, not the building. And the document that carries all of that is the format bible.
Cole Brennan: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is, that bible is essentially the whole product. Hundreds of millions in global licensing fees. And it's legally almost impossible to protect.
Malcolm Reeves: No reliable external legal mechanism. That's documented. The industry knows it.
Cole Brennan: So the recipe card you're selling — anyone can technically cook the same dish. And yet The Traitors is in forty territories doing local remakes right now. How does that hold together?
Malcolm Reeves: It holds together because someone in the 1980s decided the recipe card itself was the product. That's not obvious — it had to be invented. Reg Grundy is the name. Australian producer, looked at a successful show and thought: don't import it, don't dub it — deconstruct it, then sell the instructions to rebuild it elsewhere. That's the shift.
Cole Brennan: Wait — so before Grundy, people were just... dubbing things?
Malcolm Reeves: Importing finished tape, yes. Or occasionally remaking something that worked without anyone really thinking about *why* it worked. Grundy was the one who said — no, the why is the sellable thing. You document the why, you license the document.
Cole Brennan: And the document is the format bible. Which is — I mean, it's not just a premise summary. It's camera angles, music cues, the length of pauses before a reveal. Actual production infrastructure in a binder.
Malcolm Reeves: Invariable elements locked down, variable elements flagged for local negotiation. That's the architecture. But here's what gets interesting — the bible doesn't travel alone.
Cole Brennan: The flying producer. Right — and what does that person actually *do*? Like, someone gets on a plane, lands in Korea or Brazil, sits on a foreign set and... what? Watches? Corrects? I can't quite picture Tuesday morning for that job.
Malcolm Reeves: They're transferring specialized know-how that isn't written down. The bible is the explicit layer — the flying producer carries the tacit layer. The rhythm of the edit, the casting instinct, why a particular beat *lands*. And — actually, this is the part that reframes the whole system — every market they visit, the knowledge flows back. By MasterChef's fifteenth territory, the format package is smarter than it was at the first. The local adaptation *improves* the blueprint.
Cole Brennan: So the product is — wait, that's not what I expected. The format is evolving *through* its own adaptation cycle. It's a living document pretending to be a fixed blueprint.
Malcolm Reeves: And that's why the risk reduction logic works for networks. You're not just buying a proven concept — by the fifteenth sale, you're buying fifteen cycles of audience-tested refinement. The bet keeps getting safer the more it's been placed.
Cole Brennan: But that 'living document' framing — that's actually what makes the invariable/variable split so hard, right? Because if the bible keeps evolving, who decides which pieces are locked?
Malcolm Reeves: Now that's the central decision. And getting it wrong is what kills an adaptation. Not bad casting, not bad scheduling — getting the wrong elements locked.
Cole Brennan: Betty. Yo soy Betty, la fea. RCN Colombia. That show ran five years in Colombia before anyone adapted it. Five years.
Malcolm Reeves: Five years. Yes.
Cole Brennan: And when it becomes Ugly Betty on ABC, it's — I mean, same premise, same archetypes, the awkward woman navigating a glamour industry — but the emotional register is completely rebuilt. The Colombian version is this sprawling melodrama. ABC's version is, like, warm workplace satire. Same format bible, I assume, but which one is actually following the blueprint?
Malcolm Reeves: That's the right question — and I think the honest answer is neither, fully. The premise and the character archetypes traveled. Betty's outsider-in-a-glamorous-world, the mentor figure, the rival — those are invariable. But the tone, the pacing, the cultural references, what makes the audience care about her? That's all variable. And ABC rebuilt that entirely for an American sensibility.
Cole Brennan: Greg Silverman said almost exactly this about The Office — documented it. The intent was to use the best ideas of the British original and make it 'its own American idea.' Brent becomes Scott, the dynamic stays, the tone completely diverges.
Malcolm Reeves: And MasterChef — Endemol Shine's case — holds the competitive cooking structure constant across what, dozens of territories, ranks number one in the cooking category across many of them. But the texture of each version is almost unrecognizable market to market. The variable elements aren't cosmetic. They're where the show actually lives.
Cole Brennan: Which is — actually, wait — if the variable elements are decisive, the blueprint is almost beside the point. And we haven't even touched why the industry still can't predict which adaptations land. That part gets darker.
Malcolm Reeves: Darker is the right word. Because Albert Moran — he's the scholar who's actually documented this rigorously — his work lands on something the industry would rather not say out loud: blueprint fidelity does not predict outcome. It's not a soft claim. It's the documented condition of the whole trade.
Cole Brennan: Wait — not correlated? Like, following the bible more closely doesn't actually improve your odds?
Malcolm Reeves: Not reliably. Because what actually determines outcome is — local writing talent, performer chemistry, production competence, broadcaster scheduling, censorship environment, audience expectations in that specific moment. None of which the format bible touches.
Cole Brennan: So the thing the industry is selling — the standardized, tested, fifteen-cycles-refined blueprint — it's genuinely not the decisive variable. The execution is. And I mean — nobody can predict execution.
Malcolm Reeves: The Traitors. Same core rules. Forty territories. And — and this is the part that stays with me — radically different tones everywhere. Not just aesthetically. The show *means* something different in each market. And the industry still cannot articulate why.
Cole Brennan: Forty territories. All3Media International running those simultaneously. Same premise — and they can't say what variable produces which result.
Malcolm Reeves: No systematic account. That's documented too. They have no reliable model for which cultural or production variables predict success across markets. The flying producer is there partly because the bible can't carry that answer.
Cole Brennan: Which means — wait, actually this reframes the whole format-owner-versus-local-writer debate — the format owner is selling certainty they don't actually have. And the local showrunner opens that bible knowing their audience, knowing their performers, and has to make a bet the bible can't help them win.
Malcolm Reeves: And nobody knows who's right until broadcast. That unresolvedness — that's not a flaw in the system. That's the condition it permanently operates under.
Cole Brennan: The question I can't shake — and it's been sitting there the whole time — is what is actually being sold. Like, if the bible can't predict it, and the flying producer can't guarantee it, and the legal protection is... I mean, it's private contracts and vertical integration holding the whole thing up, not actual IP law. So the format owner doesn't really own it in any way copyright recognizes. They're selling a relationship. Maybe a reputation. But not a product with enforceable edges.
Malcolm Reeves: I can't resolve it cleanly either. The system runs on trust and commercial relationships because it legally has to — that's not a workaround, that's the architecture. And yet hundreds of millions flow through it. You see, what holds it together isn't the document. It's the shared interest in pretending the document is enough.
Cole Brennan: Pretending. That's — yeah, that's a little unsettling actually.
Malcolm Reeves: And it works. Until it doesn't. That's where I'll sit for a while.
Cole Brennan: Good conversation. Genuinely — thank you for keeping me from just spiraling into Betty lore for an hour.
