1. DEAREST PETS
If I had to indicate the most typical format trend of the pandemic era, I would say the pet show. Of course, programs with pets have always existed, but they were quite rare and isolated. Vice-versa during the Covid time these shows have blossomed like flowers on the screens all around the world (with different results, as usual): Dieting With My Dog, Pooch Perfect, Dog Patrol, Puppy School, Second Chance Pets, Top Dog, Dog Almighty, Dog House are just some titles of this trend.
Now another brand-new format is added to this long list: Dating With Dogs (created by the French Coyote and sold by London-based Can’t Stop Media), which will premiere on TF1 Group’s TFX on 26th October.
The concept is clear from the title: thanks to the show’s dating application (nice element!), singletons will select different suitors relying on their instinct as their choice is solely based on the suitor’s dog photos and a few personal info.
Before meeting the owner, the singleton will only meet their dates’ dogs on a romantic “face-to-nose” and, after that, the singletons must eliminate one of the suitors before meeting them in person.
The singletons, the suitors and their dogs will then spend a week-end together at the singleton’s place. They’ll do anything in order to seduce each other, while making sure the alchemy also happens with the dogs.
The formula owner/pet continues to work, since Warner Bros. International Television Production (WBITP) has already optioned it in 12 countries, including the US and the UK.
2. NUDE AVATARS
Send Nudes - Body SOS, which premiered at the end of August on E4 (the British free-to-air public broadcaster owned by Channel 4), belongs to the new trend of formats massively using new technologies (VR-Virtual Reality, AR-Augmented Reality, AI-Artificial Intelligence…) in the unscripted.
Examples of this group are Your Home Made Perfect (thanks to VR glasses people can see how their new house will be before being restructured physically), Your Body Uncovered (always using VR glasses, the patients literally look inside their bodies to discover the effects of their illness - see Friday’s Espresso 3rd June) and others.
More than the formats themselves (that, to tell the truth, are not always so exciting), the trend is important for exploring the new possibilities these technologies can offer: sooner or later the right formula will be found.
In Send Nudes - Body SOS participants with very personal body hang-ups have their naked bodies scanned using virtual reality technology. 3D animated avatars, which they can view from every angle (no VR glasses needed), will show them an ideal of what they could look like if they went ahead with their desire for cosmetic surgery.
The host, together with a panel of 50 strangers, will provide frank feedbacks on the changes to help the participants decide whether to go for the surgery or not.
Produced by Crackit Productions, the format will be launched by Passion Distribution as one of its packed slate of programming for the upcoming MipCom.
3. REBOOTS: THE COMFORT ZONE OF UNSCRIPTED
Reboots have always been in the history of Tv and cinema. But it’s a fact that we've never seen as many as in this period. Unscripted specialists Lisette van Diepen and David Ciaramella on the FRAPA (the Format Recognition and Protection association) newsletter of October point out this evidence, too, emphasizing that also the “new” streamer platforms do exactly the same (about that, see also Friday’s Espresso of 19th August and other past issues).
To confirm this trend for reboots, there has recently arrived the news that the German channel Sat.1 has greenlighted new versions of 4 “ultra classic” shows: Herzblatt (The Dating Game, first aired in 1965), Jeopardy! (the famous quiz show that premiered in 1964), Die Pyramide (The $10,000 Pyramid, another game show that debuted in 1973) and Die Gong Show (1976), that are all set to return this winter (exact dates have yet to be confirmed). This means that these 4 historical formats together are 210 years old.
In my modest opinion, the matter is not primarily the reboots of old classics (even if are indeed too much), but the fact that the new ones chosen to be on air, apart from being relatively few, are often “little” and unambitious. As if the buyers had ceased to seek the next “big” thing in the brand-new formats. And this is a real problem.