Fremantle’s Rob Clark

The Fremantle format catalog is an enviable one by any measure, with its bevy of megabrands that continue to be recommissioned and a mix of brand-new concepts ready to travel. As director of global entertainment, Rob Clark has been a key architect of the hit-filled slate while managing the global rollout of a slew of successes. He tells TV Formats about the current demands in the marketplace and the levels of risk broadcasters are exercising with regard to commissioning.

TV FORMATS: How has the last year shaped up for Fremantle’s format business?
CLARK: It’s been a very good year. You have to look at it from two different aspects. One of them is, how have the shows that are on-air doing and how many are there? Last year, we probably had more shows on-air than ever before. On the whole, they were doing really well. Even some of the old beasts were having very good years. In terms of shows that we lost due to the pandemic, there was only one last year of consequence, Britain’s Got Talent, and it’s back this year.

The other aspect to consider is, what’s coming through the pipeline. At first, I was worried that people, particularly when working in isolation, wouldn’t be able to develop shows. I was wrong. We’ve had some very clever, quite innovative formats that have come through that have been commissioned.

Fremantle has bought [production companies from Nordic Entertainment Group], and they’re fantastic. They are a great addition to both the creative pipeline and our production excellence. They’re a very good fit.

TV FORMATS: What trends have emerged in the format marketplace?
CLARK: The big trend is that there are many more places that you can sell your formats to. That’s hugely important. If you go back even three years, the great wise owls that dominate our industry all assumed that the global SVOD platforms would be solely interested in documentary and drama. Of course, that’s not the case. They actually want a proper schedule that appeals to everybody. There’s a lot of reality being commissioned from those platforms. The other trend is that the SVODs are not just global; they’re also local. Because of the nature of how Fremantle is set up—we have local production companies talking to local broadcasters often about local shows as well as global shows—we are doing particularly well at being able to meet the demand [from] local-language SVODs. That will be an increasingly important market for us. Having said that, there hasn’t been any noticeable decrease in the orders that we’ve received or the demand or the passion that we recognize from the traditional broadcast sector. If you’re looking for a meta trend, it’s that there is more opportunity if you’ve got formats.

I was born into a world where, in Britain, there was ITV and the BBC; as a child, I had two options. Whereas now, you know how many options there are! The availability of content, both live and being streamed, is vast. So, shows that have some sort of brand recognition are very much in demand. That’s very good for Fremantle. The Price Is Right at Night in America was the number one show on CBS of that night. Blankety Blank, or Match Game, was the biggest game-show launch of 2021-22 on BBC One on a Saturday evening. It hadn’t been on the air for more than a decade, but it came back with a new host and absolutely smashed it. Brand recognition works.

How do you punch through with new programming? It’s very difficult! To launch a new program now is probably harder than at any point I remember in my entire career. Having said that, it can work—if you capture the imagination of both the audience and the broadcaster, and the broadcaster uses that imagination in how they promote the show. It’s not just about being live; it’s about having something that’s promotable.

TV FORMATS: Do the mega-formats continue to go from strength to strength?
CLARK: This year is the 20th anniversary of American Idol. It’s also 50 years of The Price Is Right. The Price Is Right is on every day, and it’s doing amazing figures for a daytime show. It was the number one show when we did The Price Is Right at Night. That tells me, if you get a show right, if a show is looked after and cared for, kept current but without abusing the format, then it can be around for a long, long time. With Idols, it’s been two decades—and that’s not just in America; that’s in a number of other territories such as Sweden and Germany. Last year, India had the most successful season it’s ever had for Indian Idol. It’s in its 12th season (it doesn’t play every year); we did a 75-episode run, and it was the number one show (minus sport). Indonesia hasn’t had The X Factor on-air for over five years, and yet, it’s absolutely running away with the ratings at the moment. Australia, after ten years, is bringing back Idol. I find it fascinating that after this amount of time, these shows are still in the psyche—it’s a hell of a long time!

Then you look at the shows we recently acquired: The Farm is a show from Nordic Entertainment Group that now sits in the Fremantle catalog. It’s doing amazing business in Scandinavia, Brazil and other Eastern European countries. This is a format that is over 20 years old. The mega-formats that you know—and people talk about mega-formats as if there are hundreds of them, but really there are probably ten in the whole world—are still doing very well. The latest of the mega-formats is The Masked Singer—while that doesn’t sit in our catalog, we make it in around 20 territories now.

Better Than Ever owes its life to the fact that these shows have been around so long. It recently launched and aired on RTL 4 and did amazingly well. It’s a talent show where the talent has been on previous series. I called it a voyage of rediscovery; you’re reminding yourself as a viewer of the talent you’ve seen in the past on shows like The Voice, Got Talent, The X Factor. Better Than Ever is a more mature talent show in that sense. It’s story-led and is about what happened to [the contestants] when they were on [shows previously] and why they are now better than ever. Often their voices have matured amazingly well. When they’re singing songs about having loved and lost, now they’re old enough to have loved and lost. It did really well. It premiered on the SVOD Videoland, and then it ran on RTL 4 [in the Netherlands] on a Saturday night in a late peak time. We have quite a lot of people who were keeping a close eye on the ratings and seem very satisfied with it.

TV FORMATS: Are broadcasters sticking with what they know works, or are they taking swings on new concepts?
CLARK: There are broadcasters from major territories that still are taking big risks, and they’re not necessarily the ones that traditionally did. There are other broadcasters that are taking big risks within their own [spectrum]. Some are more conservative and will want to see a show in multiple territories before ever commissioning. They don’t commission anything in prime time that’s local and certainly not that has longer runs. Often, the initial series runs now are much smaller than they used to be. Broadcasters are still taking the risk, they’re putting their foot in the water, but they’re not actually going for a swim. They’ll see how it does—with three or four or five [episodes]—and if it works, they’ll come back and commission. At first, this was quite frustrating. But I completely understand why they do it. I’m supportive of people taking that view. They’re buying, but they are shortening their odds by not committing to huge series.

There is also a lot of collaboration between networks, which there never used to be. Lots of people are talking to us about having an American network and then another network involved. They are hedging their bets in a way; they are trying to reduce their risks. Launching a new show is bloody hard! If you can try to de-risk it by initial outlay in cost or by seeing how it works somewhere else first, I get it. Having said that, there are still some companies that are taking real risks with shows. Channel 4 in the U.K. is putting its neck on the line with a number of formats that are quite out there. And they’re not small orders. One is Dating Like the Stars. It’s using the idea that in many movies, there are these fantastic love scenes that we all instantly know—whenever you see somebody on a potter’s wheel, you instantly think of Ghost. It takes the concept of these well-known scenes and uses it as the basis for a dating show. It’s absolutely brilliant. You’ve got a number of concepts at play: the fact that they’re being asked to act; there’s no small talk—they meet and their hands are immediately on each other’s bodies; and you feel as a viewer like you’re being let in on a secret of how these shows are being made, like when everybody first saw the audition process on Idols. We’d always had that audition process, but it had never been filmed. You’re being let in. Over my career, I’ve done an awful lot of dating shows: The Dating Game, Blind Date, Take Me Out, Farmer Wants a Wife. The secret is, it can be a lot of fun, but if at the end of the day you don’t care who they pick, it won’t work. This one had me invested.

We have two shows on our slate that involve the concept of DNA and family. One is a Korean show that launched earlier this year and got amazing ratings: DNA Singer. It’s a talent contest, and within the series arc, you end up with one winner. But everybody that enters has a famous celebrity as their relative (not all of them are singers, either). It’s a guessing game, which is still a big trend, and also a talent show. Then there’s Fame in the Family, which is where four people have been chosen to have dinner with a celebrity—which some of them are related to and none of them know who. Over the courses of the meal, they are trying to work out if they’re the person who is related. It’s a guessing game that uses the concept of family DNA and unknown relatives.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve all become very judgmental as viewers. Even without tasting it, we can tell if it’s good cake. We call tell if someone is a good singer or if they should be Alan Sugar’s new apprentice. People have an opinion on everything! It seems like all of the boundaries of television have been pushed aside and everything now is up for grabs. But there is one area that had never been looked at: parenting. [9Network] and Eureka Productions have launched a show called Parental Guidance. It was a big hit for them, and it’s coming back. We’ve got a big sale behind it. This show was not just a big financial commitment, it wasn’t just a big commitment in terms of broadcast hours, but it genuinely was a big risk in terms of, are the viewers going to accept this? It is in an area that is one of the last untouched in reality TV. It’s a fascinating show. We’ve already got a lot of interest in that.