Why US TV Networks Have Stopped Developing New Formats

American broadcast television gave the world two of the most durable format engines ever built, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. So why haven't ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox originated a genuine new format hit in years?

Walk through their current unscripted schedules and the pattern jumps out immediately. Match Game is back, this time with Martin Short instead of Alec Baldwin. Hollywood Squares is back, this time with Drew Barrymore and Nate Burleson. The Voice has a spinoff. Jeopardy has a spinoff, and then another spinoff. The Traitors, The Floor, Destination X and The 1% Club are all doing well on US screens right now, and every single one of them was invented somewhere else, in the Netherlands or Belgium or the UK.

Two shows this year were genuinely new. The Greatest Average American on ABC, a trivia format built around celebrating averageness, hosted by Nate Bargatze. America's Culinary Cup on CBS, Padma Lakshmi's first cooking competition in years. Neither one flopped. Neither one broke out. Greatest Average American spent months bouncing between "leans renewal" and "leans cancellation" in the trade press, landing on a rating so unremarkable that one tracker called it, without irony, the most average performer on ABC's entire schedule. Nine years from now nobody will remember it existed, and nobody will particularly regret it, either.

That is not innovation dying. It is innovation showing up, half-heartedly, and being met with a shrug.

The development did not disappear. It moved address

Look past the four broadcast networks and the story changes completely. Chris Coelen's Kinetic Content built Love Is Blind for Netflix in 2020. It has since been remade in eleven countries and counting: the UK, Brazil, Japan, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, Poland, the UAE. Variety went back through the last twelve years of unscripted television and found only four format hits that spawned multiple foreign-language versions while topping the charts in their own market. Three of the four came out of Coelen's slate: Love Is Blind, The Ultimatum, Married at First Sight.

Then there is Beast Games, a hundred-million-dollar reality competition that started life as a YouTube concept from Jimmy Donaldson and became Amazon Prime Video's biggest unscripted show ever, in any territory.

Put those two data points next to each other and a shape appears. American format development has not stopped. It has left the building the networks live in. It is happening inside independent production companies serving the streamers, and it is happening in the open on YouTube, where a creator proves an audience wants something before a single format fee changes hands.

The networks kept the schedule and gave up the workshop

A network schedule needs filling every year, whether or not anyone in the building has developed anything worth putting on it. So the gaps get filled with what is safe: a reboot with a beloved host, a licensed format that already proved itself somewhere else, a spinoff of something already on air. None of that requires a development team to take a real swing. It requires a development team to manage risk.

Follow the money and it tells the same story twice over. The networks are paying format fees outward, to Dutch and Belgian originators, for the shows that are actually landing. Meanwhile the format that is proving most exportable right now, the YouTube-to-streamer pipeline, arrives essentially free, tested and de-risked by millions of unpaid views before a network or streamer ever has to commit a commissioning budget to it.

I made a similar argument recently about ITV: nine shows, each fronted by a genuine A-lister, all cancelled after one series. The talent was never the problem, the format underneath it was. American networks are leaning on something different, borrowed formats and nostalgia casting, but the underlying move is the same. Both are ways of avoiding the harder, riskier job: building a new format engine from scratch and finding out, the expensive way, whether it actually works.

That job has not disappeared from American television. It has just stopped happening at the four places that used to own it.

It isn't just a streaming story either

It would be tidy to say this is purely a digital-to-streamer pipeline, YouTube feeding Netflix and Amazon while broadcast sits it out entirely. The UK complicates that. ITV recently picked up My Year in a Cottage Garden with Alan Titchmarsh, a show built out of Middlechild's YouTube channel, and put it straight onto a broadcast schedule. No streamer in the middle, no format fee changing hands from one territory to another. A YouTube audience, proven and counted, walked directly onto ITV.

That is a different route to the same destination. Beast Games is digital-to-streamer, an audience built on YouTube handed to Amazon at platform scale. Titchmarsh is digital-to-broadcast, the same proof-of-audience logic landing on a linear schedule instead. Two different buyers, reaching the same conclusion: a YouTube audience is now a legitimate substitute for a pilot.

Where the opportunity actually sits

If origination has moved, then knowing where it has moved to is worth more than mourning where it used to be. For anyone developing formats for the American market right now, three things follow.

First, the buyer worth pitching isn't always the network. It's the independent producers building slates for the streamers, the Kinetic Contents of the industry, who are doing the real format engineering and taking the real risk on a new mechanic.

Second, proof beats pitch. Beast Games and Titchmarsh didn't get commissioned on a deck. They got commissioned on an audience that already existed and could be counted before anyone signed anything.

Third, the gap itself is the opportunity. If the four big US networks really have stopped originating, they're sitting on schedules with nothing behind them for the next cycle, and nothing behind them the cycle after that. Someone is going to have to start actually developing again. The only question is whether it's a network finally deciding to fund it properly, or another independent outfit proving the audience first and forcing the network's hand.

I am dyslexic. AI helps me make this readable. The thoughts and opinions are my own. There are no auto generated articles and I read and research with rigour.

Jonathan Glazier Format creator and executive producer altmedia