Trish Kinane OBE spent four decades at the centre of the global format industry. She was MD at Action Time, one of the earliest dedicated format companies in the UK, before spending a decade at Fremantle as president of worldwide entertainment and then president of entertainment programming in North America, where she oversaw American Idol, America’s Got Talent and The X Factor.
Few people have seen the format business from as many angles, across as many markets, over as long a period. In this conversation, she traces the British invasion of the American format industry, explains why large development teams almost never produce anything good, and reflects on why the creator economy feels like the early days of the independent production sector all over again.
When the great British formats arrived in America in the early 2000s – American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The X Factor – they did not come alone. They came with their people.
Kinane was part of that wave. When she moved to the US to run Fremantle’s entertainment operations, she found herself working largely with British producers, directors and researchers who had been brought over because they knew how to make these shows. The knowledge was embedded in the people, not just in the format bibles.
“We brought a lot of these British teams over, partly because they made them in the UK, they knew how to do them. And therefore you’re minimising your risk by bringing people who know all the little tricks. Because as you know, if you make lots of great tiny decisions, it makes the whole thing great,” she says.
It started with Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick on American Idol, and continued through the subsequent format wave. The Americans noticed, and were not always gracious about it. There was, Kinane recalls, “a bit of a snarky pushback” about British directors. “Oh, British directors, they just look at their camera script, they don’t look at the monitors.” She is matter-of-fact about it: complete nonsense, but a real cultural friction that had to be navigated.
What is striking about her account is not the cultural friction but the structural insight it reveals – that the British advantage in the US format market was not just about creative ideas. It was about accumulated craft knowledge, the know-how of how to cast, produce and edit these specific kinds of shows that had been built up over years in the UK and simply did not exist in the US at the same level.
Kinane’s account of the British invasion confirms what our ecosystem research identifies as one of the central mechanisms of format export success: the transfer of not just IP but creative expertise. The UK’s format dominance was built on a generation of producers who developed their craft in a specific institutional environment. When those producers moved to the US, they carried that environment with them in the form of tacit knowledge. The format was the visible product; the expertise was the real export.
Kinane is direct about the structural problem with the US market for format creators: it is extraordinarily difficult to retain rights.
This is not a new observation, but Kinane frames it from the perspective of someone who spent a decade navigating it from the inside. Her advice, consistent with the broader industry consensus, is to start elsewhere, prove the format in a market where you can retain the rights, build the international track record, and then bring it to the US from a position of strength.
“You would always try and start it somewhere else and then bring it to the US. But then, of course, you do really want the US broadcast to give you the track record which enables you to sell it in the rest of the world. So it was a sort of combination,” she says.
The Netflix model crystallises the problem. Kinane wonders aloud whether any compromise is now possible on global rights, territory exclusions, revenue shares, some form of participation for the creator. She raises the obvious counterfactual: “Imagine if you’d given The Traitors to Netflix.”
The answer is that The Traitors would be a Netflix show rather than one of the most widely licensed formats in recent history, generating royalties across dozens of territories. The format business as it has been built depends on that kind of territorial exploitation. Conversely, Netflix’s model, in its current form, makes it structurally impossible.
The risk aversion of American commissioners compounds the problem. Kinane confirms the observation that commissioning in the US is a structurally more precarious position than in the UK or Netherlands. The US culture is one in which backing a failure carries real professional consequences, regardless of the formal employment structure. The incentive is towards the safe choice.
Kinane’s confirmation of the US as a hostile environment for format IP retention is consistent across every American-focused interview in the Creative Leadership Insights research. What is distinctive about her account is the inside view of how Fremantle navigated this by building relationships, establishing precedents and using the group’s scale to create more favourable terms over time.
But the structural problem remains: the US is the world’s most important format market and the hardest in which to build durable IP value. That tension has shaped the strategies of every major producer working in the American market.
Kinane spent years watching large, well-resourced development teams at Fremantle and elsewhere fail to produce anything of significance. Her diagnosis is precise: the problem is not talent or resources; it is the nature of full-time development itself.
“They had all the lingo, all the tricks for sparking creativity and all the management speak and the leadership conferences that tell you this is how you do it. I never saw anything good that came out of that sort of development,” she reflects.
Her observation about why is particularly sharp. People who spend their entire working day evaluating formats develop a reflexive rejection instinct. They have seen everything, or think they have. Every new idea gets measured against what has already been done. “You would go with an idea and they’d go, ‘Yeah, no. Seen that? Oh yeah. No. Heard about that. Yeah. No, that doesn’t work.’ And it’s because they see it day in, day out.”
Her solution, developed at Action Time and refined over decades, is what she calls a hybrid model: creative people who work in production and development simultaneously. The energy of actually making shows feeds back into the development process. The ideas stay connected to reality and the talent stays motivated.
“It’s better when they’re in production as well, because they’re using all their skills and their creativity and they’re excited. And then maybe in their downtime, let them do some development as well. Because that hybrid of actually doing it, seeing it in action, having that buzz, having that creative input can feed back into ideas,” she says.
The practical benefit is also significant: hybrid contracts mean year-round employment, which means you can retain the talent rather than losing them to competitors during the gaps between shows.
Kinane’s critique of pure development teams is consistent with Sir Peter Bazalgette´s account of Endemol’s central creative function. “Honestly, we didn’t come up with very much,” he said.
And with the broader ecosystem research finding the conditions that produce original formats are not those of systematic, managed creativity but of individual creative agency operating within a stimulating environment. The hybrid model she describes is essentially an attempt to preserve the conditions of independent production – variety, stimulation, creative accountability – within a larger organisational structure.
Kinane is genuinely excited about the creator economy – not as a threat but as a reminder of something she felt at the beginning of her career that she has not felt quite as strongly since.
One format that grabbed her attention was Chicken Shop Date, featuring a young woman called Amelia Dimoldenberg sitting in a fast food restaurant, low-key flirting with A-list celebrities over chicken wings. Almost no budget. Enormous audience. A-list guests. And a feeling of authenticity that the established formats, with their clichés and their sob stories, have largely lost.
“It’s quirky, it’s interesting. This is now really real people who haven’t had an opportunity before to do it, not at the whim of a producer, they do it themselves and they’re finding an audience,” Kinane says.
What strikes her is the structural parallel with the early days of the UK’s independent sector. The Broadcasting Act of 1990, which required major broadcasters to take 25% of their output from independent producers, created a sudden opening for producers who had previously been locked out. The creator economy, she argues, is doing something similar, by giving access to distribution to people who would never have been allowed near a television studio.
“It’s got that sort of buzz and excitement,” she says. “And it’s not boring. Because, like I said, these shows that I do, all these talent shows, if the judges say to me one more time, ‘You’ve earned your place on that stage,’ just all those clichés. Stop it.”
Kinane is careful not to predict what will happen next. Nobody knows. But she believes that somewhere in the tsunami of creator content, something will emerge that becomes the next Idol, the next Got Talent, and that whoever spots it first will have a significant advantage.
Kinane’s parallel between the creator economy and the early independent sector in the UK is one of the most historically grounded observations in this research. The Broadcasting Act of 1990, which she lived through, did not just open doors to new companies, it created the conditions for an entirely new generation of creative talent, people who had previously been excluded from the industry, to find their voice.
Our ecosystem research identifies that opening as one of the precursors to the UK’s Communications Act of 2003 and the subsequent explosion in British format exports. If the creator economy is genuinely analogous, the question is who will be the Action Time of that new wave: the company that figures out how to turn the raw creative energy into a tradeable, scalable format business.