Over the last two decades television formats have been at the crux of a radical transformation in global television. The new environment created by the rise of the format trade is characterized by an extraordinary increase and intensification in the sources, directions, and volume of exchange of new televisual concepts or formulas. One of the most notable changes in this new marketplace is the rise of small players in locations that were inherently marginalized and isolated in the "old world" of television. Rethinking Television Formats focuses on the unlikely Israeli turn of fortune in the era of the global format to tell a wider, and alternative story about the very nature of formats. In tracing Israeli television's rise to be a leader in designing and distributing globally tradable innovative televisual concepts, this book explores the deeper reasons that allowed formats to so radically transform long held hierarchies in the global television system.