Shameless, the push-pull of transatlantic fiction format adaptation, and star casting

Abstract

With a long history of transatlantic exchanges, recent years have seen a notable number of UK-to-USA format adaptations. Factually-based programming (including the Idol franchise) has generally been the most numerous, the most commercially successful and received the most sustained critical attention (e.g. Oren and Shahaf 2012). However, adaptations of fiction formats have met with increasing scholarly attention, and this article will build on this work, interested in the ways in which, as Jean K. Chalaby has noted, the adaptation process for scripted formats: cannot be as perfunctory as for other genres. Scripted genres are the most culturally sensitive, and a comedy or drama cannot be reproduced as mechanistically as a game show or talent competition. […] Any scripted adaptation must go beyond copycat television and reactualize the script for a new audience. (2016, 6) This article will explore the complex push-pull of factors involved in adapting fiction formats across the Atlantic. Here, my invocation of the term 'push-pull' differs from Annette Hill's recent usage in her discussion of fiction format adaptation, where 'the idea of push-pull dynamics is understood as complicated power relations in the transactions between television industries and audiences.' (Hill 2016, 755) Instead, I draw on Albert Moran's (2009, 88) identification of a push-pull tendency in the television format trade between the poles of homogeneity/convergence and heterogeneity/difference. While Moran's analysis is specifically focused on the issue of language, his attention to the conflicting impetuses that mark formats can be usefully linked to Heidi Keinonen's (2016) emphasis on format adaptations as complex sites of culturaland, I would add, industrialnegotiation. Keinonen furthermore locates a schism within existing format scholarship, distinguishing between broader analyses of global format trade (which draw on a political economy approach and frequently do not pay sufficient attention to cultural issues) and analyses of individual case studies, which 'usually limit themselves to the analysis of the final product, the television text, thus ignoring other levels of format industry, like production and reception.' (2016, 4) In my endeavour to undertake an analysis of a specific transatlantic format adaptation that engages with both cultural and production/industry contexts, I have found the term 'push-pull' a useful idea through which to understand and articulate the tensions and negotiations that emerge in the transatlantic trajectory under investigation. The complexity of the push-pull dynamics of interest to this article is only accentuated through the discursive scrutiny bestowed upon such transatlantic adaptations by audiences and press/critics. Fiction format adaptations are often and increasingly consumed with the source programmes as a point of reference and comparison. In the case of transatlantic format adaptations, the shared language, history and cultural commonalities between the USA and the UK only facilitate such compar...

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