Global Television Formats

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A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FORMATTED PLEASURES

Eddie Brennan

Despite all their apparent diversity and difference, most successful television formats¹ are very similar. They offer a very limited palette of audience pleasures² by concentrating, for the most part, on entertainment rather than information or education. Formats are about fun. Moreover, formats promote a particular kind of fun. This chapter argues that, by promoting audience pleasures based in the pursuit of individual and materialistic goals, most television formats are consonant with a dominant orthodoxy which sees markets as the only way to organise society.³ This elective affinity between format pleasures and free market ideology, however, does not come about through any deliberate ...