Global TV Formats Queer Contemporary China

Abstract

TV formats are sets of transferable ideas, principles, and procedures to produce and remake television programs.2 They “are designed to ‘travel well’ across national boundaries” and are adaptable to various domestic markets.3 While the transnational exchange of TV formats was considered “an Anglophone development,”4 the rapid integration of television production, circulation, and consumption into a global trade system since the 1990s has created many popular global TV formats that have become profitable media franchises and been widely (re)made in different parts of world.5 A case in point is the Dutch reality television franchise Big Brother (Veronica, 1999–) that has been adapted in more than sixty regions worldwide as of August 2021.6 Since the late 1990s, the television industry of the People’s Republic of China has also started to creatively appropriate standardized global media and cultural formulas to produce content compatible with local political-ideological