Networking overseas for a TV hit

In faraway places like Europe, Australia and Israel, Hollywood talent agents are tapping the imaginations of screenwriters and producers, hoping to unearth some magic or brilliance.

No longer confined to Hollywood, or even to sister city London, where many reality franchises have been born, the search for the next Michael Scott and Betty Suarez is on, now that The Office and Ugly Betty have proved that it is possible to successfully adapt a foreign scripted series for a big U.S. audience.

"I'm sure in London, people are wondering who all these Armani-clad agents are descending on the city, turning over rocks, looking for new formats," said Morgan Wandell, senior vice president of drama development at ABC Studios.

The studio arm of the ABC network is producing two pilots derived from British series and one from New Zealand as contenders for next fall's lineups on ABC and CBS.

"There is more interest in finding this kind of material because it is one more arrow in our development quivers that help us find the next big thing," Wandell said.

This pilot season there are more scripted foreign formats being developed than in years past, even though the writers' strike cut the typical pilot orders by about half. Of the 50 pilots competing for a time slot at ABC, CBS and Fox, 10 are based on foreign series - eight from Britain, one from Israel and one from New Zealand.

Additionally, NBC recently announced 12 new series as part of its lineup for the next TV season, including two foreign adaptations. NBC's version of Australia's longest-running comedy, Kath & Kim, about a dysfunctional mother and daughter, starring Molly Shannon and Selma Blair, will premiere in the fall. The Listener, a Canadian drama about a paramedic who can read people's minds, is scheduled to premiere in the summer.

By comparison, last pilot season, eight of 112 pilots at the five broadcast networks were based on foreign series. In 2007, only two of the eight pilots with foreign roots - CBS' Viva Laughlin and the CW's Life Is Wild - made it on the air and neither survived.

Fox's game-show hit The Moment of Truth, NBC's summer reality show Baby Borrowers and CBS' summer drama Flashpoint also were born overseas.

Does this signal that the Hollywood idea well is running dry, particularly after a disappointing fall in which no new TV series broke out?

Absolutely not, said Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios.

"It's that we're opening our doors to the entire world and we're not just looking to one place for those ideas. I wanted to bring an entrepreneurial energy to our broadcast channel and work with foreign partners because the foreign marketplace is incredibly rich right now, and if we can come up with ideas that sell globally from the beginning, like Heroes, it benefits how you finance them. These partnerships also make sense because our foreign partners will put money into a show, which gives us big, big production value."

The creative exchange, in fact, works both ways and is hard evidence of a shrinking global entertainment world. Many of the most popular shows in America are also hits around the world - CSI: Miami, Lost and Heroes among them. But in many cases the shows air intact, with characters like Detective Horatio Caine (David Caruso) of CSI: Miami being dubbed in Portuguese for the Brazilian audience, for example.

Desperate Housewives is another story. Several versions of the ABC soap have been remade in Latin America and on Univision, using creator Marc Cherry's scripts, but fine-tuning the ladies for cultural relevance. Inspiration for a TV show can come from almost anywhere - existing shows in another country (HBO's recent In Treatment was a remake of its Israeli original), a book (the CW's Gossip Girl) or movies (Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles).

"You never know where the zeitgeist comes from," said Rick Rosen, an Endeavor Agency partner. "The networks are more receptive to it because they are struggling to find something that is the next breakout hit."

Like all shows fighting to exist and survive, foreign series purchased for this market go through the same development process as American programs. Often they are altered and adapted considerably.

"In reality and game shows, the formats tend to be exact," Silverman said. "But in scripted series, they require adaptation for a specific market. It's a cocktail of perfect proportions and any one ingredient - the writing, the directing or the casting - can throw the whole thing off."

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