RDF’s lawsuit against Fox and Rocket Science over the Trading Spouses format is the culmination of six months of wrangling and the result will have repercussions far beyond the US˳
News first broke of Fox’s plans to fast-track Rocket Science’s Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mom back in June, some 18 months after ABC picked up a pilot for Wife Swap USA from RDF’s LA outpost and Michael Davies’ Diplomat Productions˳
Both formats involved families switching matriarchs for a period, though Fox emphasized the fact that its show involved a $50k cash prize˳ Much to ABC’s chagrin, the Fox show went to air first, going out late July this year, while ABC’s reality chief Andrea Wong stuck to her autumn roll-out for Wife Swap˳
Fox’s spoiler “left us and ABC in a dilemma,” RDF’s director of programmes Stephen Lambert said during the Monte Carlo TV festival in July˳ “The question is whether to run some episodes early over the summer and give up all that marketing push of launching the show in the autumn˳ It’s a hard call – depressing but hardly surprising˳”
At the same industry event, Fox Networks Group president and ceo Tony Vinciquerra was forced on the defensive over his network’s apparent cloning of the RDF show˳
“It’s not a copycat,” he said˳ “Trading Spouses has been in development for a year, and is actually based on the Worlds Apart format that airs on National Geographic Channel˳” Produced by Endemol-backed True Entertainment, Worlds Apart has whole families from different countries like Kenya and America switching lives˳
“We bought the Worlds Apart format and Mike Darnell has simply ‘Foxified’ it˳ He has made it more American and edgy˳ It will be very different to Wife Swap,” Vinciquerra promised˳ Despite, Vinciquerra’s comments, Fox hasn’t cited Worlds Apart as the source of Trading Spouses since˳
Then in August, unfazed by copycat claims, Fox greenlit 10 more episodes of Trading Spouses on the back of solid ratings performances, still before ABC’s version of Wife Swap was even out of the gate˳
By now the US media was on Fox’s case, accusing it of ideas theft, especially in the light of the ongoing rows between Fox’s The Next Great Champ and NBC’s The Contender˳ Angst was also being expressed about how Trading Spouses would impact the entire business of selling TV ideas˳
“If Wife Swap fails because of this, our business is changed forever,” the ABC show’s co-exec producer Michael Davies warned readers of the New York Times˳ “This would be horrible for the Anglo-American television business and horrible for any number of producers working in the reality business˳”
Though ABC is not involved in RDF’s lawsuit against Fox and Rocket Science, the net’s svp of alternate programming, Andrea Wong, has expressed similar concerns˳ “If Trading Spouses kills off Wife Swap, the viewers will basically be telling us that they value speed of execution over quality,” she told C21˳
“The transatlantic trade in formats is built on the sanctity of the idea, and once that goes it’ll be very bad for the television industry as a whole,” she added˳ “It’s a very bad situation we’re in here and it’s not over yet˳”
However, some execs at RDF were trying to see the success of Trading Spouses in a positive light: “It’s encouraging that Trading Spouses is working well as it opens up the life-switch genre for us,” said RDF International’s chief exec Matthew Frank in August˳
“There may well be a pay-off for us come September,” he added, not only in terms of focusing media attention on ABC’s Wife Swap show but also building general interest in ‘real-life’ reality, as opposed to the fantasy shows like Survivor˳
Growing the genre was seen as beneficial for RDF’s US business in the long term: “As a company we trade on reality formats that take viewers into people’s homes˳” He even said that “people swapping lives is an idea that has been around for years˳ It’s only the defining moments in the show that mark one format from another˳”
By September, when Frank’s comments were vindicated and Wife Swap USA was winning its slot, the row was snowballing into an international issue, since Wife Swap clones had started appearing in other territories˳ In Germany, RTL2 had already launched Frauentausch, which Frank described as a “blatant copy” of Wife Swap˳ Hungary’s RTLKlub and Austrian broadcaster ATV-Plus had also aired Wife Swap-esque shows of their own˳
Then Fox’s international distribution arm, Twentieth Century Fox TV Distribution, revealed that it had sold the US show to Five in the UK and was taking its format to sell to international buyers at Mipcom, escalating the conflict further˳
At the time, Peter van den Bussche, vp of European format licensing, defended the move thus: “The family-swapping theme is simply the zeitgeist at the moment˳ Most people attack Trading Spouses without even seeing it˳ Wife Swap is a great format but Trading Spouses has moved the life-switch genre on a bit – everyone understands the jeopardy that cash prizes bring˳”
Now, after six months, the Wife Swap/Trading Spouses row is just one of several ongoing lawsuits about format theft, sitting alongside the Pop Idol/X-Factor case, which has recently seen Simon Fuller’s 19TV and Simon Cowell’s companies going legal˳ Another that hasn’t yet reached the legal stage is the Supernanny/Nanny 911 row between ABC and, you guessed it, Fox˳
The RDF/Fox case will be particularly followed in Germany, where indie producers are this week gathering to discuss a solution to the situation there, where just like Hollywood, formats are being cloned and licence fee-paying prodcos are being left in the lurch by copyshops˳
David Lyle, chief of format recognition and protection body Frapa, recently summed it up best: “The entire format sector is built on a series of gentlemen’s agreements – but there aren’t too many gentlemen left˳”
