Avi Nir, CEO of Keshet Media Group, explores the lessons of the Israeli format boom, the appeal of reality TV and the different kinds of courage when it comes to creative risk-taking.
Avi Nir is the CEO of Keshet Media Group, the Israeli commercial broadcaster that was at the centre of the Israeli format wave of the 2010s. Under his leadership, Keshet developed and exported formats including Rising Star, Boom! and Deal With It.
In this conversation, he reflects on what drove the Israeli wave, why reality television erodes when it becomes predictable, and what it means to be brave enough to stop a project when your instincts tell you something is wrong.
The Israeli format wave was not, in Nir’s telling, the result of favourable market conditions or institutional design. It was the result of a cultural disposition, a drive to innovate and to prove that a small country at the corner of the world could produce something the world wanted.
Israeli broadcasters adopted the reality television genre a few years later than the rest of the world. But when it arrived, it landed with extraordinary force, opening what felt like an entirely new creative frontier. “Reality had an amazing impact in Israel. It totally took over from entertainment, from talkshows,” Nir recalls. “Then it resonated with younger creators who realised, ‘Hey, there’s a new genre out there. It’s up for grabs. It’s still evolving.’”
Keshet’s response was deliberate. Nir describes it explicitly as a mission statement: the channel’s purpose was not just to achieve ratings but to be creative: “We work in television because we like to invent stuff. It’s the urge to invent. The readiness to take risks. The pride in saying yes, we can.”
What is distinctive about the Israeli case is that this motivation was not primarily financial; it was psychological. The drive to prove that a small country could produce something globally valuable created a creative energy that institutional structures alone cannot generate.
Nir’s most analytically original contribution is his framework for understanding both the appeal of reality television and the reason it erodes. His starting point is an analogy with sport.
“Reality shows are like sports shows for non-sports lovers,” he says. “If you don’t love sport but you still want competition, where you don’t know how it will end – and you’ll have a favourite – where supposedly anything can happen, you like this human notion of uncertainty. That’s what sports is all about.”
But reality, unlike sport, is produced. And at a certain point, audiences began to sense that the unpredictability was managed. “When there is a notion among the audience that they have deciphered reality, that after all it’s predictable, somewhat scripted, you lose the edge. You’re not sport anymore,” he says.
The formats that have survived share a common feature: genuine unpredictability. Big Brother is live; Love Island is live; The Traitors created a fundamentally new game in which the outcome is structurally uncertain.
“The shows that still work massively have a live element that makes them still unpredictable. It is the live element, but not necessarily live per se – it has a ‘chaotic’ element that is stronger than the format, stronger than ‘the plot,’ which these days can be anticipated,” he says.
“The Traitors created a totally different game in reality, but we rarely see these breakout inventions anymore. The problem is that too many shows were cloning the same show.”
Nir’s argument is structural: reality’s appeal depends on the authenticity of its uncertainty. When audiences begin to perceive the production hand behind the unscripted surface, the fundamental contract between format and viewer is broken.
Rising Star, the talent show that was unveiled to the market with much fanfare back at Mipcom 2013, is the format most associated with Keshet’s international ambitions. Nir’s account of its origins is a direct rebuttal of the overhyping narrative that has surrounded it since then.
The format began not with a technology idea but with a creative problem: how do you express audience votes in a genuinely original way? The inspiration came from theatre and the use of semi-transparent screens in stage productions. “It wasn’t a gimmick. It was: how do we express the audience votes in an original way? The technology served the idea. The idea didn’t serve the technology.”
The format was further strengthened by connecting it to the Eurovision Song Contest, giving the competition a purpose beyond winning. “When you have a real purpose, not just winning the show but representing Israel in Eurovision, the ethos of what the show is about becomes much, much bigger.”
Nir describes Israelis as among the earliest adopters in the world, open to new ideas, willing to give a new format a chance. But that openness, he adds, has a hard limit.
“You can’t bullshit them,” he says. “They’re open. They’ll give you a chance. But they’re not forgiving. You can’t get away with cutting corners, covering mistakes and inconsistencies. They will welcome something fresh, something new, innovative, but it’s not enough. It needs to have clarity, syntax and intuitive logic.”
An audience that is open but unforgiving creates a particularly rigorous testing environment. This may be one of the underappreciated reasons why Israeli formats that did succeed internationally were unusually robust.
Nir’s most personally revealing insight comes when he reflects on what he would have done differently. He is not talking about taking more risks; he’s talking about the courage to stop a project when your instincts tell you it is wrong.
“There is a pitfall with reality shows: at some point you start the process and you need to be aware of your wishful thinking,” he says. “I should have stopped in some cases. On one hand pushing very hard, on the other hand being honest enough to yourself, saying, ‘I’m walking a very dangerous path of wishful thinking.”‘
He describes the sensation precisely. You feel it in your bones. Something is not organic, not natural. But you are in momentum, surrounded by groupthink, committed to a launch date. “When there is a failure, I felt it in my bones earlier. The intuition was: we are pushing it. It’s not organic. But you are in momentum. There are two kinds of bravery: being brave by taking risks, and being brave by stopping.”
The machine of development, the teams, the budgets, the schedules, the groupthink, all creates its own momentum. Stopping that machine requires a different kind of courage from starting it. And it requires the willingness to trust instinct over investment. It’s something that is not replaceable by AI.