Rising Star Blazes a Path to Eurovision

Kelly Wright, VP of distribution and new business at Keshet International, talks to TV Formats about the successful Rising Star format.

The season six finale of Rising Star airs in Israel tomorrow (February 12), and the stakes are high. The Keshet series has become Israel’s official Eurovision vehicle for identifying and nurturing their representative in the international talent competition. This means that the series guarantees its winners access to one of the largest talent platforms in the world, a point of difference from other competition shows in the marketplace.

This is the fifth year that Rising Star’s winner will go on to represent Israel in Eurovision, and since the partnership began the country has seen a marked improvement in its standing in the competition. “Israel won in the late ’90s with ***Image***Dana International, but in the years since then we hadn’t had anyone crack the top 10,” explains Wright. “Ever since we started sending the Rising Star winner, though, we have consistently landed in the top 10. Last year we won! It was a phenomenal demonstration of the power of the show and the power of the nation at home, who are selecting the finalists in Rising Star and determining who the winner is. They are able to say, ‘This is who we feel best represents us.’ They know better than music industry experts or government officials who will go on to make an impact.”

Because Israel won Eurovision in 2018, the country will be hosting the event this year. “It’s going to be a massively impressive affair,” says Wright. “It’s a moment of great pride for us as a channel and as a country.”

She believes that one of the reasons the Rising Star-Eurovision partnership has taken Israel to the top in five short years is that the audience is speaking for who it believes in. “The wisdom of the crowd has proven itself,” says ***Image***Wright. “Also, because we started using this talent show as a vehicle for finding Israel’s representative, we received many more impressive people auditioning to be a part of this show, from professional singers to those who haven’t made it yet. They’ve all come out with their flags flying saying, ‘Hey, I’m Israeli and I want to represent Israel, too.’ So, we’ve had incredibly diverse acts compete, including The Shalva Band, a group of disabled people, and they’ve been a sensation. It really has been an incredible season.”

Rising Star has been a “phenomenon” in Israel from the very start, says Wright. “It really revolutionized the way we watch TV.”

The series launched in Israel on Keshet 2 in 2013. Prior to this, “we had a local talent show that was developed around the same time as Idol, and that version was on the air for ten seasons—it’s a classic,” explains Wright. “Two of the judges from this season of Rising Star came out of that talent show; a lot of people went on to become really famous singers and actors. It was a real star-making vehicle. It was very successful, but after ten years, we felt creatively that it had stalled and kind of hit a wall. Focus groups of the audience revealed the same thing. Everyone would watch it but it was kind of just ‘same-same.’ We don’t want to be the channel that does same-same.”

So, even though that series was still the number one talent show in Israel and one of the top five entertainment shows every year, Keshet decided to completely reimagine it. “We took it off the air, reworked it, added all of this mobile interaction and it’s completely changed it,” says Wright. “Our previous show was called A Star Is Born, so that is why ours is called Rising Star—in Hebrew it’s The Next Star, so it’s like a next version of A Star Is Born. It was a very ambitious move to spend a lot of money on redeveloping something that already worked. This is something that we talk a lot about to our clients who have done 20 seasons of a show or 10 seasons of a show and they feel very comfortable because it’s working, but is ‘working’ enough to sustain a commercial free-TV broadcast business?”

Local versions of Rising Star have made noise as well. Originally created and produced by Tedy Productions and Keshet Broadcasting, the format was the fastest-selling talent show on record when launched at MIPCOM 2013. To date, it has been adapted locally in 17 territories worldwide, including India (Colors TV), Brazil (Globo), Indonesia (RCT1), China (CCTV) and Greece (Antenna)—with upwards of 200 million votes cast globally.

“We have been promoting Rising Star as the same kind of journey to Eurovision as we have in Israel throughout Europe and any of the Eurovision competition countries,” says Wright of the format ambitions. “A lot of those countries already have a very specific mechanism [for choosing their Eurovision entry]. Breaking into something that’s a very established business has been a little bit challenging. Nonetheless, what we’ve been able to do is very, very impressive all across Europe. The fact that Israel was able to win, with someone who was completely unknown in the business nine months before she won in front of nearly 200 million viewers, is a phenomenal success story. I can only hope that we continue to push it and start selling that version starting from this year.”