Foreign Imports Join The Channels

The British are coming to the fall TV schedule. And so are the Dutch, the Swedes, the Australians and the Japanese.

For anyone who hasn't been keeping up, several network hits of the past year were imported from foreign countries. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the show that saved ABC, came from England, and Survivor, on CBS got its start in Sweden.

There's more on the way. Millionaire continues and Survivor II is scheduled for January. At the same time, several new shows were hatched overseas. NBC bought Chains of Love from the Dutch creator of Big Brother, where one person will be chained to four others of the opposite sex. ABC is developing two group task-type shows, The Mole from Belgium and Jailbreak from Britain.

What gives? For years, foreign programming meant the subversive, overeducated humor of Monty Python or such starchy dramas as Masterpiece Theatre with the even starchier Alistair Cooke.

Now, after years of exporting heaps of lowbrow popular culture to the rest of the world, the United States has turned the tables, becoming a voracious consumer of pop programming produced on foreign shores.

"The one thing we were really good at, after we lost the auto and electronics industries, was really stupid entertainment ideas," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "When the British crossed the Atlantic with Millionaire, what a sad day that was. We may even lose our supremacy."

The irony, of course, is that the two monster successes brought in from overseas were originally developed here. Quiz shows like Millionaire go back to the '50s, and MTV helped pioneer reality television eight years ago with Real World.

If anything, that makes the current boom of foreign TV imports even more like the British invasion of rock bands in the '60s, when the Rolling Stones wowed us with music rooted in the blues, a distinctly American invention.

Borrowing from overseas TV formats is not exactly new, but previous examples were far more subtle or went through substantial adaptation for U.S. tastes. All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Three's Company and Cosby all had roots overseas.

These days the opportunities for foreign shows to make it big here are greater than ever. Networks are looking for new material to keep viewers from going to cable, and cable networks have an appetite for new programming that can hardly be satisfied with in-house productions.

Such ready-made shows as Absolutely Fabulous and Two Fat Ladies went a long way to getting Comedy Central and the Food Network off the ground.

The Food Network had an even bigger hit with the campy Iron Chef cooking-contest show from Japan, which is now the channel's No. 2 show, following the rapid-fire Emeril Live ith chef Emeril Lagasse.

Judy Girard, the Food Network's general manager, said the unexpected success of Iron Chef, which was brought to the attention of executives by a production assistant has made her more open to new ideas.

"We programmers all think we know what the viewer wants and that getting ratings and viewers is very predictable," Girard said. "But the show that's going to make your schedule is always a surprise. Iron Chef shouldn't work, but it does. It's what keeps programming people like me humble."

While the boom in imports can be traced to last summer's arrival of Millionaire, networks and studios have been experimenting with foreign formats for years.

Stone Stanley Entertainment has been scouring Europe and other continents for years, remaking the British shopping show Born Lucky for Lifetime and then Pax beginning in 1992.

This season, the company has several projects in the works based on overseas formats, including The Mole for ABC and Popstars for WB, an Australian show where people audition for parts in an amateur rock band. Two other shows in the works at Stone Stanley, All You Need Is Love and The People Vs., also came from abroad.

"It's much easier to buy a format that's already developed than it is to develop one yourself," said Scott Stone, co-founder of Stone Stanley. "Once we use up all the international formats that are brilliant, my expectation is that American companies will come up with the new formats."

Then again, the United States is just one of many countries importing successful TV formats. After being launched in Britain in 1998, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is now shown in 31 countries. The CBS version of Big Brother is one of the few around the world to have flopped.

Like the Big Brother contestants who refuse to leave the house for a $50,000 bounty, foreign formats may be around for a while. The question is which shows will make it to the end.

"I think it's good for the industry as a whole," said Thompson of Syracuse University. "We were getting a little inbred, and the U.S. television industry was in desperate need of some new injections into the gene pool."