Reboots are doing big business as commissioning levels and budgets decline and broadcasters look for sure-fire hits for their spend. Is this stunting creativity and blocking new players trying to enter the market, or stimulating a stagnant commissioning picture?
Survivor aired for two seasons on ITV in 2001 and 2002
Reboots of old formats has always been a hot topic of debate in the television industry.
Lazy, risk-averse commissioning, appealing to the lowest common denominator, obstructing new ideas and innovation, and allowing the bigger companies with vast IP libraries to further corner the market at the expense of new indies with fresh takes. Or event television, beloved by an audience, that can be brought back to linear TV on day and date, feel-good nostalgia for tough times, innovative in their own way and valuable fodder for broadcasters to fight back in straightened economic times.
Having brought classic formats Survivor and Gladiators to the BBC for the first time, and rebooted Blankety Blank and The Weakest Link, you would expect the UK pubcaster’s director of unscripted Kate Phillips to launch a defence of remakes, and at the recent Edinburgh Television Festival she did exactly that.
Kate Phillips
“There is still an audience for big event television, so if somebody is pitching you a reboot of that, our job as BBC commissioners is to give the licence fee payer the best value for money and the best shows on screen,” she says. “No commissioner instinctively wants to do a reboot – they love that process of working with an indie to take a paper idea from pitch to screen. But ultimately we do need to put the best pitches on screen and sometimes, not often at the BBC, that is a reboot.”
Phillips points out that of the 3,000 hours she is currently responsible for, the above four shows account for just 30 hours – 1% of the output. “When somebody pitches us a reboot they have to convince us more,” she insists. “It’s been on another channel and we want to be original and fresh, so the indies behind them have done a lot of work on why now, what’s different, what talent. It’s never a ‘lift and shift.’”
That’s a point echoed by Jonno Richards, MD of Fremantle’s Talkback, which rebooted its classic music quizshow format Never Mind The Buzzcocks for pay TV broadcaster Sky.
“There has to be desire for that IP from the channel, something they think can work well now and the package you offer has to be un-turn-downable,” he says. “Buzzcocks is a known format but needed stellar talent around it to feel right for Sky. You’ve got to work out how to change and tweak the format so it works not only for people who return to it but also feels relevant and right for a new audience. As much creative thought can go into reboots as original ideas.”
Jonno Richards
For Faraz Osman, however, public service broadcasting (PSB) money going into rebooting shows that previously aired successfully on commercial networks is something of an eye roll. He set up Gold Wala in London and Bristol in 2018, exactly the sort of diversity-focused and UK nations- and regions-based prodco the BBC and Channel 4 are supposed to be prioritising.
“There is some professional jealousy. That is the journey, as an indie, we want to take,” he admits. “My worry is to get there we need a show and a brand. It’s a massive risk, I get it, when you commission something this volume, this amount of money, scheduled in this way. You must have such a level of trust and value in what you’re getting pitched. What I’m concerned about, as a small indie, is we’re never going to be able to compete with that. It’s hard enough to compete on a talent perspective, then finance and infrastructure. Now we have to compete on IP where the audience knows the brands.
“In my eyes, television, particularly PSB, is a zero-sum game. There’s only a limited amount of money and every time you commission something pre-existing then, by definition, you’re taking it away from something new and interesting that is coming from a smaller and diverse indie. If you’re taking existing IP, which is likely to come from a big, established company – because that’s how they grow – then we need to acknowledge that will have a damaging effect further down.”
But to Phillips’ point, when only 4% of UK commissions over the last four years have been reboots, is this an overblown, overstated problem? Edinburgh panels are certainly prone to naval gazing.
Sky’s updated version of music quizshow Never Mind The Buzzcocks
Osman says: “UK television is the best in the world because it comes up with the best formats, the best ideas and sells them internationally. I’m worried we’re seeing lots of different brands moving in this direction – Big Brother to ITV, Gladiators to the BBC, Taskmaster to Channel 4 – and it gives me pause for concern that we’re doing that instead of championing the new, risky idea and giving them time to breathe and get to that stage where they can be international hits.”
Phillips makes the point that it’s precisely because she is spending public money that it needs to at least be made by companies with experience in that area, and on new ideas like Rap Game and Eating With My Ex, the smaller indies that pitched them have been paired with bigger firms for support.
“We have a creative diversity fund at the BBC, of which we’ve so far spent £44m [US$55m] and funded 67 programmes from 48 indies. We’re really conscious of helping emerging indies grow as part of our public service remit,” she says. “The flip side is when we’re doing a big, Saturday night, high-risk show, we need a production company to make it that has the experience and expertise, because so much of it is about execution.”
Faraz Osman
But Osman makes the point that while small indies pitching big ideas are regularly asked to pair up with a more experienced firm, the bigger companies are never asked to bring a smaller prodco on board their grand project to upskill them.
“As a company, we continually get told, ‘We really want to work with you.’ And then we hear they’re rebooting something and gone back to the same companies again,” Osman says.
“If we came to the BBC, ITV or C4 with an idea, we would fully expect them to turn around and say, ‘It’s a really great, big, bold idea – we think you need to copro.’ I don’t understand, particularly with PSBs, why it doesn’t happen the other way around. If you’re going to reboot Gladiators [for example] and do a show that takes up such a huge amount of public money, allow that copro to happen with a smaller company. ‘We will give you the commission, it’s a great idea and you’ve done the development.’ But if you don’t give MGM that commission they’re not suddenly going to go under, whereas if we don’t get a commission it has real impact on the British business.”
Phillips described this as a “valid point,” while Richards at Fremantle’s Talkback adds: “I have targets, I’ve got a bottom line and it’s a commercial venture, so it’s got to work for us. Seriously, if it was genuinely for the benefit of the industry and ecosystem, there’s a conversation to have.”
There is also a potential trap of believing all reboots are a guaranteed success. Streaming service BritBox hung its launch on a reboot of classic satirical puppet show Spitting Image from Avalon, with mixed results from critics and fans of the original 1980-90s show.
The new generation of the BBC’s Gladiators
Richard Allen-Turner, exec producer and co-founder at Avalon, says: “When you are coming back to something that is iconic and people hold it in high regard you have to tread quite carefully. You can split with your core audience by trying to radically change things too much.
“I strongly feel that authenticity and staying true to the original DNA of the show is crucial to making them work. You can obviously contemporise them and do things to make them speak to a modern audience. Things move on and you have to change. Creatively, it would be boring and unfulfilling, but there are challenges and when you bring things back it’s not as simple as ‘it works let’s do it again’ – that is a danger.
“Spitting Image the live show, taking it off TV, has been quite liberating and meant we can really get our teeth stuck in. Part of the issue with bringing it back is we’re living in an era where there are parameters around what you can and can’t do and balance, whereas live it’s been absolutely brilliant. If we brought it back to television a third time I think we’d do things slightly differently.”
Emily Hood, joint MD of Rumpus Media, has a foot in both camps. She’s trying to get new and fresh ideas away but is also now behind Amazon UK’s reboot of Takeshi’s Castle. She makes the point that while the UK industry is ringing its hands over a commissioning hiatus from major broadcasters and the effect on freelancers of lack of work in a cost-of-living crisis, it’s probably a case of beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to actually getting commissioned.
“Our company is entirely based around original IP, although we are stepping into this world,” she says. “If these shows are really successful in the re-worked form then that will hopefully have an impact on the industry as a whole, which can only be positive. Hopefully, it can have a halo effect.”
Phillips adds: “I’m making no apologies for bringing back Gladiators or Survivor. They were really good pitches, they’ll be really good shows. And while we’re talking about the freelance work shortage, they’re big shows requiring big teams and providing a lot of work to people.
“What we do at the BBC is, if we do have a big show with presence, you can use that to launch another show off the back of it. Where can we take that audience next? We love to launch a new show off the back of something established.”
As ever, the truth about reboots is probably somewhere in the middle. At Edinburgh in 2022, Channel 4 chief content officer Ian Katz described them as “depressing” and “microwave TV.” Then he commissioned a reboot of classic BBC format Changing Rooms. It’s complicated.
