But take a closer look at what is actually being broadcast over the region's airwaves and an entirely different picture emerges. In reality, only a handful of Middle Eastern broadcasters are actually producing or buying original, homegrown content and that convoluted process — rife with tales of scandal and intrigue — can sometimes be far more entertaining than the shows themselves.

In the most generous analysis, the region’s content market is slowing evolving into a professional business with increasingly high production values on multi-million dollar adaptations of format shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Superstar (Pop Idol) At worst, the industry is populated by inexperienced television executives who are far more comfortable spending the lion’s share of their station’s relatively meager budgets on ideas from the West rather than investing in local talent, and the prospect of building up potentially globally competitive brands of programming. Producers and writers, meanwhile, are faced with an ambiguous system that’s not always known to reward quality above other factors, including outright bribery.

“There is a lot of money under the table at Arab TV stations,” says Youssef El-Khoury, the general manager of Cedar of Arabia, which has produced shows for Dubai TV and MBC. He says that at some stations—not necessarily those mentioned above—an unidentified individual may approach a scriptwriter or producer seeking a sort of commission even before negotiations with senior management begin: “They will ask you how much you want for a show,” he explains. “If you say $200,000, they say ask for $250,000.”

Listening to El-Khoury describe what went on during the making of his recent children’s show, Aish Safari (Live Safari) is like watching a scene straight out of a Hollywood film. After three months of painstaking negotiations with MBC3, he was finally off to Africa to film the program, which vaguely resembles a children's version of Survivor. There began an unrelenting battle with station representatives who he says were constantly sending a flurry of text messages back to Dubai to make the slightest decisions. Just before wrapping up the shoot, he would spend three days in a South African jail cell, arrested for not having enough money to pay the local production crew. When the show finally went on air, El-Khoury, who was still awaiting his final payment, says he was alarmed to hear all new narrations and theme music added to the series that was “noisy and distractive.” His explanation? Once the head of the network had expressed positive view of Aish Safari: “everyone tried to get a piece of it.”

Though perhaps an extreme example, El-Khoury’s experience is by no means an isolated case. Whether or not the broadcaster is culpable (MBC had no comment on the charges), the elements of his unusually candid story from sluggish decision-making to untimely payments and unethical practices are complaints that reverberate throughout the industry from prominent producers all across the Arab World.

And El-Khoury’s unadulterated view of a station’s personnel and its preferences—although one of the few to be quoted on record—is equally universal: “I didn’t meet anyone who understands TV,” he says. “They always buy formats, they don’t want to think; they don't want to create.”

Making the pitch

Despite the shortcomings, in one way or another, original television does eventually get produced in the region and some of it may actually be good enough to be sold internationally. But how does the process work and is there really any process to speak of?

Such questions are usually met by sighs or chuckles from seasoned producers. “Every station is complicated,” says Ziad Batal, whose Media Group is now producing the second season of its show Street Smarts for Infinity TV in Dubai. Generally speaking, a writer/producer will present an idea either in the form of a fully fledged sample episode, known as a pilot, or as a written or oral proposal. But there really is no set of concrete rules, on who to see or how to market.

“I have flown everywhere, Rai TV (Kuwait), MBC (Dubai), Future TV (Lebanon); every process is different,” Batal explains. “Some stations have committees, some have one guy who calls the shots. You have to be in the business a long time before you can understand the mechanics.” In other words, “the new kid on the block doesn't stand a chance,” he says, and “thousands of great ideas out there don't make the light of day."

Almost any producer will tell you that having personal ties to station executives is an essential part of getting the process moving, but there is wide variance on who to speak to and the setting of such a meeting.

“At some channels you would approach a producer, the chairman or the head of programming,” says Ayman Zyoud, a long-time on-air personality at MBC, who recently established his own production house.

“Sometimes you will sell a show during a night out, sometimes it's a black tie meeting. You deal with every station differently.”

Zyoud says his latest show, a format of his own creation called Zero Debt, is on the verge of being produced by a major Arab broadcaster and is also under consideration by one of the top three US networks. He has several other original shows under negotiations, including an investigative docudrama set in the Arab World and a lucrative interactive game show concept that would include 6,000 at-home players. But like many of his colleagues, Zyoud admits the market is not one of equal opportunity, often hinging upon “unfair set-up formulas” between broadcasters and favored production houses. “The best show should win but the current situation in the market is connections and mutual interests,” he says.

Once an idea is approved, the waiting can be equally agonizing. “It takes a long time to get a clear answer,” says Ziad Kebbi, managing partner of Elements TV, which has produced big budget adaptations of Deal or No Deal and The Farm (El Wady).

The same applies to getting paid. Syrian director Mazen Rifka says some stations haven’t paid for three to four years, including broadcasters across Morocco, Tunisia, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Dubai. “Libya did not pay since 1990!” he exclaimed.

Originality vs. Economics

In defense of broadcasters, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of money out there to be spent on TV show projects in the Middle East. Many of the recently launched channels appeal to niche audiences, broadcasting specialized content such as news, business, music, sports, movies, and religious fare. The TV show market is thus largely restricted to a core group of general programming satellite channels, mainly a handful of relatively well-established pan-Arab stations in Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that can afford multi-million dollar projects. But with a broadcast advertising market valued at under $300 million, even the wealthier multi-channel networks like MBC and LBCI are generally not able to sustain more than one big budget show per season. The result is a sort of ‘one show’ formula where a station’s programming budget—up to $20 million in the case of the bigger networks—is divided in half, with one massive chunk going into a flagship project involving up to one hundred staff, and the rest supporting a number of other smaller productions that make up the remainder of the programming. The problem, say writers, is that most if not all TV stations in the Middle East would rather spend millions on buying a tried and tested idea from the West, such as Millionaire or Deal or No Deal rather than gambling on a producer from the region with a new idea.

“There is this mentality that whatever you get from the outside is better,” says Naja Rizk, CEO of Firehouse productions and a former managing director at LBC and Orbit.

“This is the Arab complex,” she explains. “Bring a format from abroad and they will pay millions, but whenever you have an original idea, they will pay you peanuts.”


Salwa Soueid, an executive producer with MBC admits that regional broadcasters may have a preference for imported formats due to high success rates and lower perceived risk factors. At the same time though, she’s not convinced that good ideas are being passed up all the time: “We are dying for new ideas,” she pleads. “Where are they?”

The problem is not due only to fiscal stubbornness among stations, she says, but also to the immaturity of the region’s TV industry.

“We just do not have experienced people. I feel we have creative people, it’s only we haven’t discovered them yet,” she says.

“It works both ways; TV stations don’t have the open-minded mentality and producers may not have the confidence.” But either way, industry insiders say the current market dynamics are not helping.

Keeping it under one roof

Script writers and independent production houses say that broadcasters tend to monopolize the TV show creation process, resulting from a lack of trust in their abilities. They say that stations seek to maintain personal control over major productions, which stunts the development of the television business as a whole by removing a division of labor between broadcasters and producers. “The Middle East today is like France 15 years ago,” says Paris-based producer Peri Cochin. “Today in France broadcasters don’t do in-house productions.”

Cochin, a French TV personality of Lebanese descent, has set up her own production company, Periscoop, and purchased and adapted format shows for Arab broadcasters such as Shako Mako (based on the French format Tout Le Monde En Parle) as well as Adam wa Hawa (adapted from the show Un Gars Une Fille).

As a co-host on the French show On a Tout Essaye, she admits that her personal ties to industry, such as her close friendship to the creator of Tout Le Monde En Parle helped in acquiring rights to the show. Unlike many other producers, this gave Cochin the opportunity to work independently from Arab stations, where she says inefficiency and slow decision-making abound. Others maintain that they have no choice but to cooperate closely with stations through co-productions that often force them into working with “undesirable crews and technologies,” according to one well-credited Lebanese producer.

Some even allege that broadcasters, in their zeal to keep a lid on spending and creativity, are likely to decline an idea that has initially been pitched to them, only to produce it later themselves. In the case of adapting a format show from abroad, this could mean that a station would simply bypass an independent producer by purchasing the idea directly from the content owner as soon as the producer’s time-sensitive exclusivity rights to make the program expire. There are also allegations of outright theft.

“When it comes to intellectual property, nobody cares,” said one Saudi Arabian producer on the condition of anonymity.

“A friend of mine recently pitched an anti-terrorism campaign to a Saudi TV station. He gave them all the storyboards and they ripped them off and produced it themselves.”
Aside from unethical practices, there is a fear that a certain ‘sameness’ will run through all regional productions if TV stations continue to hold a firm grip over the show-making process and thus isolate any form of competition from independent houses.
“It will feel the same,” says Cochin. “At the end of the day you will have the same lighting, the same sets, and so on. If you do it all in-house, you cut yourself off from fresh blood.”

What a channel wants

In an ideal world, TV writers would approach a station with a concept that falls in line with a channel’s programming line-up or core demographic. Of course in the Middle East, this could be a little more challenging. “Here you can introduce a program at any time or change a program at any time without any major reason,” says Cochin. “They don’t stick to a grid.”
Batal, who has also experienced the industry in the US, agrees that there is a lack of planning. “There’s a mad scramble to fill air time,” he says. “In the US, there is a 3 month TV guide, and here there is no such thing.”

Equally challenging is a lack of audience research and coordination between advertisers and producers. “You don’t have real competition. In France, you know the next day, minute by minute, if your show was good or not good. But here on a Saturday night, you don’t know if you did better or worse than Dubai TV or Al Rai, nobody knows.”

Longtime Egyptian producer Imad El Din Adeeb agrees that producers need to be given more direction: “I would like to see the networks putting out a wish list. The more they will tell you, the more we can cater to their needs.”

Pushing the boundaries

When it comes to choosing a genre for television content, Adeeb has no illusions about tackling taboo subjects. “We don’t go into high risk,” he says flatly. Shows made by his Egypt based production company, Good News, include Akil Umi (“Mom’s food”) and Fee Beitna Tabhakha (“A chef at home”)—the “kind of programs that never find problem with the censor,” he explains—“neutral programs that don’t harm anyone, don’t cause problems.” When the content is political, “they may or they may not like it,” he says, but, “you can never go wrong with kitchen programs.”
Still, this could be an extreme interpretation. Restrictions vary widely across the region, and Adeeb admits, “there are 22 different censors in the Arab World, there isn’t one guiding line.”
Many regional producers actually say they have a considerable amount of freedom. MBC host Ayman Zyoud has covered topics like sexual positions and masturbation on his men’s show Adam, while Cochin says her shows have covered rape, AIDS and infidelity.

“It depends how you approach a subject,” she says. “We are not here to aggravate people.”
But the limits are still there. The format show Big Brother, for example, was halted in 2004 due to protests over a mixing of the sexes. Producers also brought up homosexuality and criticism of religion as recurring taboos. “I know there are things that would succeed in the Middle East but I can’t do them,” says MBC producer Soueid, giving the example of a talk show that might feature an interview with a male couple. “Don’t tell me no one is going to watch it. The ratings would go up. But if we put it on TV, it would be like we are okaying it.”

Change in mentality?

All complaints notwithstanding, Middle East directors and producers agree that the industry has definitely undergone changes in recent years. Although bribery probably persists in some forms, many say that it has been phased out gradually.

“It happens only with one TV station,” says Mouna Mounayer, chief creative officer of Firehouse, without giving any names. “These things are becoming rarer,” she adds. “The financial and legal departments at TV stations are becoming really tough, every cent is accounted for.”
Some producers say there has even been a change in mentality: “People in the Arab World are now looking at media as an industry,” says Zyoud, “not a random business. Its not just a capitalist with extra money or deep pockets treating a TV station like a toy.”

Naji Nahal, who has produced shows like Maestro and Iktashafna El Baroud, says cronyism persists in the industry among some producers and houses, but admits that things are improving: “The competition is fierce now,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s being policed by itself.”
But Nahal and others continue to complain about trouble with payments and rates. “Stations have these preconceived budgets,” he says, noting there is little room for negotiation or imagination in terms of producing a big budget sitcom for example.

For his part, Adeeb seems to have thrown in the towel on television altogether. He says movie-making is actually a better business for his production company because TV rates have remained constant over the years while features can generate returns from multiple screenings as well as TV. “Programs are underpaid,” he says balefully. “Now the cost is very expensive and stations are still paying the same rates as five years ago.” Others are a touch more optimistic: “We are still a long ways, but we are getting better and better,” says Batal. “Stations need to work on content,” he concludes. “I can be entertained while watching TV in America; I can’t be entertained watching TV in the Middle East.”