The Use of Format Adaptation in Danish Public Service Programming

The article investigates Danish public service broadcasters' use of format adaptations over a twelve-year period in order to examine claims that formats constitute a potential threat to public service broadcasting and the national Danish television industry and culture. The article's findings, however, bear little evidence to support these claims. The practice of format adaptation constitutes a comparatively small proportion of the overall production of Danish public service content, and, more importantly, most of the formats adapted by the public broadcasters have a comparatively solid public service orientation. Instead the article argues, following German sociologist Ulrich Beck, that format adaptation can represent a form of ‘banal transnationalism’, pointing to the fact that the world is no longer exclusively denned by national boundaries.