Undercover Boss's Travels: Comparing the US and UK Reality Shows

Abstract

For some time now, television studies scholars have found the global circulation of television formats to be a productive research site. How different countries choose to produce similarly structured television shows reveals much about country-specific industry practices, culturally-specific quandaries of format adaptation, and longstanding histories of global cultural circulation (see Aveyard, Moran, and Jensen 2016 for a recent introduction to the topic, and Lukacs 2010 for an anthropological approach). In turning to television formats, a range of disciplinary scholars are specifically focusing on “an interconnected parcel of particular knowledges that are activated in the production, financing, marketing broadcasting, circulation and consumption of a TV programme” (Aveyard, Moran, and Jensen 2016, 3). In general, however, anthropologists have not yet fully turned their attention to the production and circulation of television formats as a productive ethnographic site for exploring different cultural perspectives, which overlooks objects of study rich with potential for examining, among other things, cultural differences and problems of translation (for some exceptions, see Ball and Nozawa 2016, Ganti 2002 on film, and Mandel 2002).