Vietnam naturally selects RTI format

Vietnamese broadcaster Ho Chi Minh City Television (HTV) has put RTI Mediaset’s primetime entertainment gameshow format Ciao Darwin into production, with an air date at the end of March.

According to the format’s UK-based distributor Distraction, Ciao Darwin is also the subject of negotiations with an undisclosed network in the US. There it will be produced by Don Mischer Productions, the company that picked up the format in 2003.

The ‘survival of the fittest’ format, aimed at families, pits different categories of people (men, women, the young and the elderly) against each other in a search for the ‘ideal human.’ Over the course of the series, celebrity-led teams of 50 compete in a ‘comedy take on natural selection.’

The series was originally produced by RTI Mediaset in Italy for Canale 5 and has since been sold to Canada’s SRC, Poland’s TVN, Hungary’s TV2, Romania’s Antenna 1, Romania’s TVR and pan-Arabic Future TV.

Nella Allegretti, international acquisitions executive for Mediaset, said: “Distraction has taken the international format Ciao Darwin from strength to strength for RTI Mediaset. We are very pleased about the Ho Chi Minh production and anticipate big things in the US.”

RTI Mediaset is currently in development on another new format, Guess Who? (Cultura Moderna), due to officially launch at MipTV in April.