TV Dramas: Bordercrossing, modification, and transactiontelevision broadcasting service. The concepts of the adaptation of TV format and content glo-
balization are particularly pertinent to East Asia.
These adaptations of TV contents can be placed along a theoretical continuum of intra-
Asia flow of content: local modification, bordercrossing, and (in-between the two) transnational
transfer, as shown in Figure 7a.1. The most common one might be local content modification,
which means that television stations directly take in cultural products from other countries
and modify or clone them, mostly without acknowledging the original TV program. We can
identify these programs based on bare traces or pastiche of various elements from other Asian
counterparts in the final programs produced, usually without clear acknowledgment of the
original source.
In art history, pastiche is the usual practice of unsophisticated painters and refers to the
blending of various techniques and styles of major masters for producing an art piece. This
kind of duplicitous intention of mimicking does not deliver the producers’ appreciation to
the original, but rather they claim to own the style as if they had invented it (Hoesterey 2001).
Jameson (1991) began to apply the term pastiche to interpret the phenomenon of televisual
intertextuality, emphasizing that pastiche is a postmodern media phenomenon: pastiche is blank
cloning from various media texts to produce a so-called original and new television program
( Jameson 1998). Meinhof and Smith (2000) named this type of television program production
as TV pastiche. For these TV programs, it is hard for audiences to trace the original source of the
intertextual content, but somehow they find it familiar.
On the opposite end of the theoretical continuum is bordercrossing, or direct adaptation,
which is the display of the original cultural products produced in other countries as if these pro-
grams are from their own home country. Bordercrossing is not a new concept. In colonial times,
when television stations had just started, many chose to “use” programs of other countries to fill
up airtime. In Asia, the most common type available since the 1970s has been dubbed Japanese
animation broadcast in other Asian countries. In the middle of the continuum is transnational
transfer or transaction, which involves a partial or possibly legal modification of the original
cultural product to cater to the tastes of the local audience. Transaction here emphasizes that it
involves the purchase of the TV format between the adopting TV station and the station that
initially created the TV format.
These different routes of inter-Asian TV flows are quite often simply put under the umbrella
of the globalization of TV dramas, when in fact these concepts—for example, transnational
transfer and bordercrossing—are two distinct concepts. The concept of transnational transfer
originates from transnational cultural flow in the inquiry of globalization and networked media
(Appadurai 1998). The understanding of the transnational transfer of TV programs points towards
Cultural
ProductLocal Modification Transnational Transfer Direct Adaptation/
Bordercrossing
Figure 7a.1 Continuum of intra-Asia flow of popular culture