From ‘The Box’ To Dumb Celebrities, Norway Is Becoming A Red-Hot International Formats Market

The average temperature in Norway hovers around freezing at this time of year, but Nation’s Dumbest, The Box, Nation’s Toughest and other shows have made it a hot formats market. With the hunt on for the next global hit, savvy buyers are keeping a close eye on the Nordic country.

Several Norwegian formats have hit the international market at around the same time. That’s partly happenstance, but also because broadcasters in Norway kept ordering new shows while others in Europe applied the brakes. That ensured a healthy pipeline of new projects, several of which are breaking cover now. “We never stopped, we heard about other broadcasters freezing commissioning and we just decided we had to stay in the game,” one Norwegian commissioner tells Deadline.

The Fjord Assembly Line
When it comes to formats, size isn’t everything. “Being in a very small market forces us to be really innovative,” says Silje Hestevik, Head of Development at commercial broadcaster TV2 when asked why Norway is having a formats moment. “It’s a highly competitive market because Norwegians all have many subscriptions and they consume so much content. We’re a small country with lots of gadgets and screens.”

Against that backdrop, risk-taking is not a choice but a necessity. “Every time we commission a new show that hasn’t been aired before, either one locally developed or a format that hasn’t traveled that much, for instance Bloody Game [a Korean format that has been successfully remade for TV2]it feels like we’re taking a big risk – but we need to do that because otherwise the audience will leave us. They expect a lot of renewal,” Hestevik says.

She adds: “There’s more competition and I think that also brings us closer to the Norwegian producers. We need to collaborate more closely.”

TV2 is leading the charge but is not having it all its own way. Pubcaster NRK and others also have unscripted formats that are hitting the international market.

NRK has shows including Heist Academy and Nation’s Toughest. The latter takes a group of people who specialize in a given field, takes away their home comforts, and tasks them with super hard trials that take place on an oil rig. In Norway, the show’s following has grown over its five seasons with Season 6 coming. Formats distributor Lineup Industries sells it internationally.

Lineup Co-Founder Julian Curtis sees a through-line with Norway and other countries such as Israel, the Netherlands and South Korea, which are modest in size but wield outsize influence in the global formats biz.

“They all have a relatively small population and a lot of broadcasters, which means that they have tight budgets, but the producers there have also made a lot of the big international shows, Big Brother, The Traitors etc. The result is a highly skilled workforce who are used to working very creatively but on tight budgets.”

He spies another factor that gives Norway an advantage in the modern world of TV. “The broadcasters are commissioning digital first. They have linear channels, but they’re not just thinking about the linear transmission and the slot, they’re interested in the different metrics [across digital].”

The Box Office
Every so often a format comes along, captures everyone’s attention, and a flurry of deals quickly follows. The Box is currently that show. A raft of agreements were inked for local versions before the first season had finished in Norway. France’s TF1 and the UK’s ITV are among the buyers, ticking off two of the biggest territories in Europe. The show is sold by its producer, Seefood, rather than via one of big international distributors.

The format sees celebrities put in brightly colored containers. When the container is opened, they immediately face a game or challenge, with zero preparation or forewarning. It was created when an unspecified streamer asked for a global format, but ultimately it was broadcaster TV2 that gave it a green light.

Seefood’s Aleksander Herresthal created the format. He says that during the pandemic and at the end of the second lockdown, he was frustrated with the everyday routine we’d all been forced into. A friend helped the Norwegian indie boss shake off the lockdown ennui with a surprise rafting trip. That provided the creative impetus for The Boxhe explains.

“It sparked the thought process of, you know, we all go into these patterns, we do the same thing every day, how do we break out of that. That was kind of the theme for the show. And then the box itself, that was the physical way of creating a format around that experience.”

He continues: “It’s simple, it’s easy to understand, and you need that, but the most important thing for me is that it doesn’t resemble something else; it doesn’t look like a version of The Traitors.”

Dumb Celebs
Norway has a pedigree with reality competition shows and several of the new wave fit that bill. 71 Degrees Northwhich saw celebs compete to be the first to reach the 71st parallel, is over 20 years old and sold well internationally. Seefood’s military bootcamp format Company Lauritzen has fared well locally.

The creators of Nation’s Dumbest have remixed the formula. “There’s tough competition in Norway to sell TV shows and there’s a lot of good reality shows as well, so we thought: Okay, what we don’t have is a competition [format] where you don’t want to win,” says Erik Solbakken who created the show with Jørgen Høst through their Montreux Film & Fjernsyn indie label.

“We love great achievements, but there are too many stories about celebrities doing something fantastic and being the smartest or strongest. Let’s turn it upside down and find the dumbest celebrity.”

Viewers took to the show in big numbers. It garnered a 33.9% share on TV2, healthily over double the slot average. “We expected it to do well, but the success was just mind blowing, it was the most watched show on TV2 last year,” says TV2’s Hestevik.

The show pokes fun at celebs but is not snarky, Høst adds. “We wanted to make fun of the celebrities, but we also wanted it to be a warm show with a comedy feeling. We didn’t know if we would succeed with that, but people really thought that it was great to see celebrities who don’t take themselves too seriously.”

Northern Highlights
BBC Studios moved for the international rights to Nation’s Dumbest and is distributing. “That top line of ‘it’s the competition that no-one wants to win’ is just really simple, and a hooky title is important in today’s market,” says Sumi Connock, EVP, Global Creative Network & Formats at BBC Studios. “Then when you actually come to the show it’s funny, it’s warm, it’s play-along and it’s got a great arced narrative.”

“It also highlights that you can be brilliant at one thing, but it doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily brilliant at everything. Underlying that is what does it mean to be clever?”

In terms of what’s next, the Montreux Film & Fjernsyn crew have a celebrity fishing format they are launching. Lineup, meanwhile, is taking another NRK show to market. Whodunnit: Easter Or Die followed ten celebs who were invited to a mountainous snowbound resort. They have been summoned by a celebrity-obsessed murderer and must play their twisted games, with the loser of each round getting theatrically killed off. The celebs must unmask the killer before they’re all bumped off.

All of the abovementioned shows help illustrate why chilly Norway is becoming a hot spot, namely a willingness to greenlight new ideas and producers generating a crop of smart and affordable formats. “It is a market that is taking more creative risks,” Connock says.

“Shrinking budgets can lead to less risk taking, but on the flip side, tighter constraints can also breed amazing creativity and innovation. It’s a territory that can deliver these really creative ideas but do them cost effectively. That combination of a desire to take risks combined with the ability to deliver at a competitive price is producing really good results.”