Global Perspective: Renewal and Transformation

NEW YORK: I went to three countries this spring—Laos, China and Germany—that made me think about change and the way the world challenges and surprises us.

With the 40th anniversary of the International Emmy coming up this November, the year 1972 is very much on my mind. And what I realized was that a trip to any of these places 40 years ago would have been impossible or very different. China was still off limits to most Americans. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had made their transformative voyages only earlier that year. Laos was a battlefield, with American bombs decimating the Ho Chi Minh Trail daily; and Germany was a divided country, still feeling its way back from the total destruction of World War II and coping with the tension between communism and the free world. How different things are 40 years later.

Laos is increasingly a tourist destination, with a developing hydroelectric power industry. China is now the second-largest economy in the world. By almost any measure of manufacturing, exports or hi-tech innovation, Germany leads Europe. (In fact, the International Academy now has more members in Germany, its largest delegation in Europe, than it does in the U.K.)

And in our business, how things have changed in 40 years—and, interestingly, how they have not. When the first International Emmy award was handed out in 1972, American tele­vision ruled the world. There were so few quality programs from anywhere else that the first awards ceremony had only two Emmys: Fiction and Non-Fiction. Quite a difference from today where in the course of a year we award over 20 Emmys.

This is hardly surprising when one looks at television around the world and at the explosive growth of the quantity and quality of programming in virtually every country. American production often sets a standard for other countries to meet, but increasingly they are meeting and even surpassing it. Witness the number of programs now succeeding on U.S. television which began life someplace else and were imported into the U.S. as formats.

What has not changed much about television—in the U.S. or the rest of the world—is the basic programming form: one-hour dramas; half-hour sitcoms, morning and evening chat shows, and even reality. They have been with us since the dawn of the television age, and they continue to dominate the medium. It’s stunning to realize that the network prime-time newscast still runs for a half hour, and still has exactly the same format as when it was introduced—in 1963! Prime time on broadcast and cable is a mix of sitcoms, dramas and reality shows which, except for looser language, look and feel much the same as their predecessors from a generation ago.

But even that is changing, an increasing victim of new technology and ever shorter attention spans. Keep a close eye on the Google/YouTube experiment with short-form programming networks. Look at what your children watch on their handheld devices. I’m pretty confident that when we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the International Emmy, tele­vision, either the physical box or what’s on it, won’t look anything like it does today. Technology will take us in exciting, new creative directions, and our world will change.

Just one example: I had a chance to visit ZDF’s new news studio in Mainz, what they call the “green hell.” The walls are painted a bright green, and news hosts and correspondents explore a virtual world in an empty room. Everything is done with computers, so that, for example, a reporter can stroll through a new airplane without even leaving the studio. It’s a whole new approach to broadcast news, with obvious risks, but great potential for the viewer and enormous flexibility for the broadcaster.

I have always thought that it is in times like this that an organization like the International Academy is particularly important. We offer our members the opportunity to become more familiar with what works in different places and, in an interdependent world, we enable professionals in each country to understand what their media counterparts in other countries want. A very useful role.

Any 40th anniversary is a milestone, and on this one, in our industry, it is tantalizing to look back and exciting to look forward and to realize where we have been and where we could be going.