Having worked at Endemol Shine Group and Fremantle during the boom years of reality, game and talent formats, and now at Waag FutureLab, Gary Carter shares his thoughts on why certain countries export more TV formats than others.
Gary Carter is one of the most experienced figures in the global format industry. He has worked across the UK, Europe and beyond as an executive, distributor and consultant, and has been central to some of the defining moments of the format business, including the international roll-out of Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
In this Creative Leadership Insights conversation, he offers a historian’s perspective on why some countries produce formats and others don’t, what South Korea did right, where China and Israel went wrong, and why AI will change production but not development.
Carter’s explanation for why some countries produce globally exportable formats and others don’t begins not with the present but with the past, and specifically with the dominant entertainment culture that existed in each country before television arrived.
His thesis is that every generation confuses a new medium with the medium it already knows. When television emerged, countries shaped it in the image of whatever came before. And that inheritance has lasted for decades.
“Every generation confuses a new medium with the medium it knows previously,” he says. “So, when television emerges, people either say it’s not as good as film, or it’s just like film. But it’s neither.”
In Germany, television inherited a film culture. The country had been, as Carter puts it, bigger than Hollywood before the First World War. The instinct was to build studios, invest in infrastructure and think in terms of production values rather than format transferability. In Italy, the inheritance was theatrical: live television, six-hour programmes, eight different shows inside one show, performers looking at the wrong cameras. Neither tradition produced a culture of repeatable, transferable formats.
The UK was different. Its television culture emerged from a tradition of radio, panel games and verbal comedy, a tradition related to music hall and working-class entertainment. Formats are fundamentally spaces in which people become funny, and in the UK, Carter argues, funny happens with the mouth.
“British humour is verbal and German humour is physical, if I can make a gross generalisation. Formats typically are spaces in which people get funny. But they get funny with their mouths. In England, that’s where it starts, in those radio formats and in panel games,” Carter says.
Add to this the regulatory framework that the UK government built – Channel 4 commissioning 100% from independents, the 25% independent quota of 1991 and the Communications Act of 2003 giving producers IP rights – and you have, in Carter’s view, the full explanation for the country’s dominance.
“The UK has a global and unfair perception that British television is among the best in the world,” he says. “And they have one enormous asset: the global brand of the BBC, which gets them in anywhere, everywhere, and does a lot to sell them before they arrive.”
Carter’s historical thesis adds a dimension to our ecosystem research that the eight-dimension model does not fully capture: the long shadow of pre-television cultural traditions. Our Format Innovation Model identifies Anglo-Saxon proximity as a cultural dimension that stimulates format innovation, but Carter goes deeper, suggesting that this proximity is itself a product of specific entertainment histories.
Countries with strong theatrical or cinematic traditions before television have struggled to make the mental shift required to think in formats – transferable, repeatable, architecture-based creative properties. Countries with strong radio and variety traditions found it easier.
Carter’s account of how Survivor found its way to Sweden in 1997 is one of the most analytically rigorous in this research. His decision was not intuitive or opportunistic; it was the product of a systematic analysis of which market had exactly the right conditions to take on a format that had been rejected everywhere else.
The format had been developed by Planet 24 for Buena Vista Television, pitched to ABC, and they rejected it: too expensive, too risky, someone might die. Charlie Parsons had tried to sell it in the UK and been turned down. It was sitting without a home.
Carter’s criteria for the right market were specific. He needed a country with massive state investment in technological infrastructure. He needed a commercial production sector that was just opening up, because that would produce hungry independent producers. He needed journalists moving from news to entertainment, the first wave of independent producers, versatile and flexible. He needed low unionisation so camera operators could also edit and interview.
And he needed something else. “The Swedes had this view of themselves as being uncompetitive, societally flat,” he says. “And yet all of the Swedes I knew would slit your throat if they thought they could get money.”
The final piece was a commissioner. Swedish public broadcaster SVT was in crisis over young audiences and had brought in a Danish executive, Pia Marquard, from Canada. She had been told she could do what she liked. And if she got fired, her job in Canada was waiting.
“I asked her why a Dane from Canada was in the [head of entertainment] chair,” Carter recalls. “She said, ‘They’ve told me they want to change the profile of their audiences, that I can just do what I like. And by the way, if I get fired, my job in Canada is still waiting for me.’ I thought, ‘You are my person.’”
She did commission Survivor. She did get fired. And 25 years later, Carter was walking through New York when he felt a tap on his shoulder – it was Marquard. She turned around and asked: “Were we right?” He said yes. She went back to Canada.
Carter’s analysis of why Sweden was the right market for Survivor, now owned and distributed by Banijay, is a masterclass in ecosystem thinking. His criteria, technological infrastructure, hungry independent producers, flexible journalists, low unionisation, latent competitive drive and broad social norms, map precisely on to the conditions our Format Innovation Model identifies as enabling format innovation.
What makes his account particularly valuable is the role of the individual commissioner: a person in a structural position of freedom, with nothing to lose, who could say yes when the entire establishment said no. The ecosystem created the conditions. The individual made the decision. Both were necessary.
Carter was one of the international television executives invited by the Korea Creative Content Agency (Kocca) to teach Korean television executives about the format trade over a period of roughly seven years. His account of what Korea actually did with that investment is one of the clearest explanations in this research of how a country can build a format export capability.
The key insight, he argues, is that Korea did not try to change its television culture. It changed its television sales culture.
“They don’t actually have to change the way they do it inside the country,” he says. “They have to change the way they present it to the outside world. They changed their expectations of selling. They changed their television sales culture. That’s what I think.”
Korean storytelling, Carter explains, is structurally different from Western storytelling. Where Western narratives are built around mountains, a climb to a climax, Korean narratives explore a plateau. They are Confucian in structure: not competitive, but masterful.
“Storytelling in Korea is Confucian. We come to the plateau and we explore the whole plateau,” he says. “Storytelling in the West is a mountain. You start at the bottom, you go to the top and there are climaxes. In Korea, they don’t like climaxes. They want to explore the field.”
This structural difference makes Korean formats difficult to export directly. But Korea’s solution was not to change its storytelling; it was to learn how to present what it made in terms that international buyers could understand and act on.
China, by contrast, got it wrong. Carter was flown to state broadcaster CCTV to teach for two weeks about working with real people in reality television. The day after he arrived, the government decreed that there would be no more real people in reality shows. “I was there for two weeks to teach them about something they could no longer do legally,” he says.
Carter’s distinction between changing television culture and changing television sales culture is analytically precise and practically important. The ecosystem research identifies government intervention as a potential driver of format export capacity, with South Korea as the clearest example. But Carter’s account reveals the mechanism: the investment was not in creativity but in market access, presentation and international network-building.
Korea learned how the format trade works and how to position its output within it, without abandoning what made that output Korean. This is a fundamentally different model from the UK, where institutional reform created the structural conditions for an indigenous format industry to emerge organically. Both models can work. The Korean model requires a government willing to invest in export capability without controlling creative output.
Carter is direct about what happened to the Israeli format wave and says he predicted it at the time.
The Israeli wave was real. A concentration of creative talent produced a remarkable run of internationally successful formats in the early 2010s. But the peak of that wave, according to Carter, was also its undoing. Rising Star, a live voting format from Keshet built around technology, was hyped so aggressively, sold so expensively and promised so much before it had ever aired that when it landed, the disappointment was irreversible.
“It destroyed faith in the market,” he says. “And if you destroy faith in the market, it made selling the format difficult because it undermined the credibility of the whole thing.”
The Rising Star format did eventually go on to be adapted in 17 markets, but the deeper problem, according to Carter, was that the entire Israeli wave was predicated on technology rather than on narrative or format architecture. The industry and the Israeli government investment behind it confused the excitement around Israeli tech with the appeal of Israeli television.
“It was a marketing bubble. It was based on technology and it was a positioning of Israel as a centre of tech entrepreneurship,” Carter says. “But the format industry relies on a high level of trust and belief. If I undermine the belief somewhere in the ecosystem, if I don’t think I can trust Israeli tech, then why would I buy Israeli television?”
Carter’s account of Israel’s decline confirms what the ecosystem research suggests about the fragility of format export positions built on individual talent clusters rather than structural conditions. The Israeli wave was driven by a concentration of creative individuals and government investment in export promotion.
When the wave broke – partly through the overreach of Rising Star, partly through structural changes in the Israeli broadcasting market – there was no institutional flywheel to sustain it. The UK’s position has proven more durable because it rests on structural conditions: rights legislation, independent quotas, broadcaster competition. Israel’s position rested on people and a marketing moment. When both shifted, the position collapsed.
On AI, Carter’s position is precise and counterintuitive. He does not dismiss AI’s potential, but he draws a sharp distinction between where it will make a difference and where it will not.
He begins with a diagnosis of how the television industry typically misunderstands technology. The mistake, he contends, is to assume that audiences are interested in technology. They are not.
Carter says: “We [producers] have always made a mistake. We fall in love with technology and we think the audience is interested in technology. I’ve never met any member of an audience who said they would like this show if there were two cranes in the studio. They are interested in something else. They’re interested in what’s happening between you and me and where it’s going to go.”
On generative AI specifically, Carter identifies a structural limitation: large language models are trained on what previously existed. And the history of the format business is that the great breakthroughs like Big Brother, Survivor and The Voice did not look like anything that previously existed. They brought things together in a new form. That is, he says, a matter of sensibility; the taste and judgement of individuals like John de Mol or Charlie Parsons.
“If you are going to train large language models on the history of television, it’s always going to refer to what previously existed. It’s never going to point the way to the new,” he notes.
Where he does see AI making a genuine difference is in agentic AI that can execute instructions autonomously. He believes this kind of AI will transform the experience of production: sitting in an outside broadcast van, managing complex logistics, automating workflows. But not development.
Carter says: “AI is going to make a difference in production, not development. It will make the experience of sitting in a broadcast van much more interesting, much easier, much less technologically bound. But for people who sit in a room and try to dream up a television programme, I’m convinced at the moment that it cannot replace sensibility.”
His ideal would be an AI that functions as a craft partner rather than a servant; one that challenges rather than flatters, that would say, ‘That’s just Survivor, isn’t it?’ rather than telling you your idea is brilliant.
Carter’s distinction between agentic AI and generative AI maps on to the research’s broader argument about the relationship between structure and agency. Agentic AI can automate the structural and logistical elements of production, the processes and systems that support creative work. Generative AI, trained on what previously existed, cannot replicate the creative agency of the individuals who built the format industry by seeing something that nobody had seen before.
This is consistent with the core argument of our ecosystem research: creative systems produce original output not through algorithms but through the interaction between structural conditions that enable risk-taking and individual agency that exercises creative judgement. AI can change the conditions. It cannot replace the judgement.