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Format Forward is a development room for people who build unscripted formats.

It is for creative developers, producers, format creators and development teams who need to turn promising ideas into shows that can be cast, produced, sold, repeated and adapted.

This is not format news for its own sake.

Every commission is a clue. Every launch tells us something about what buyers want, what the market fears, what is travelling, what is being protected by talent or IP, and what developers can learn from it.

Inside Format Forward, we look at the craft behind unscripted ideas: the premise, the engine, the casting, the structure, the repeatability, the pitch and the reasons some ideas travel while others disappear.

If you build formats, this is a place to think sharper about the work.

Format Lab

The Format Lab is where we pull unscripted formats apart to see how they work.

Market Wall

The Market Wall tracks new commissions, launches, recommissions and format deals, but not as trade news. Here, the question is always:

What does this mean for developers?

Join

Join our special development community! What’s the benefit? Great question! You’ll gain access to the Toolkit, which is my personal collection of resources I use when developing, producing and directing my content. You’ll find SOPs, templates, prompts for AI and PDFs there. Plus, you’ll receive the posts as a newsletter straight to your inbox. And just so you know, development is the core of everything I create for this site. It’s not just a collection of new format announcements, repurposed AI posts from trade press and C21, deadlines or television. Everything is written by me.

ToolKit

Here you will find the Toolkit, my personal collection of resources I use when developing, producing and directing my content. You’ll find SOPs, templates, prompts for AI and PDFs there.