It's clear why lifestyle producers ache to crack large markets - money is a great motivator - but the real question is: why do formats become hits in one market and flop in the next? It's especially puzzling when it comes to US and UK formats. Why is it that British ideas often float easily to the us, while American efforts end up floundering somewhere in the Atlantic?

It may have something to do with the emigration of UK talent to the US. For example, it was certainly a help for British producers when Jana Bennett - who had been director of programs for the former BBC Production division - stepped in as GM of Discovery Communications roughly seven years ago, or so says Nick Catliff, MD of London-based indie prodco Lion Television. Bennett played a major role in the strategic development of Discovery's channels in North America during her time there, especially at TLC. "She went there just when [certain lifestyle shows] were really taking off in the UK," Catliff notes, "where she picked them up and ran with them there. That was really serendipitous, but it worked, and tlc really had a huge boom on the back of those shows." Indeed, Bennett reportedly built reach and share at TLC from 73 million to 83 million US homes.

But it takes more than one transplanted exec to explain why British lifestyle formats shine in the US - it also often involves improving production values. As an example, Catliff cites a home burglary show Lion did called To Catch A Thief that aired on the BBC in 2003, and now does the US version of for Discovery (renamed It Takes A Thief). "The production values of the American show are much higher," says Catliff. "[Discovery is] paying more and they expect a lot more in terms of production value, certainly." (As an aside, re-titling shows is a common way of targeting. Christian Drobnyk, SVP of programming and development for TLC, where the British Scrap Heap Challenge was changed to Junk Yard Wars, says "Even little tricks like changing a title can work wonders towards reorienting your audience to what they're being served.")

It's not all about the production values, however. The audiences also have values of their own. Comparing ABC's Extreme Home Makeover with the BBC's Changing Rooms, Catliff notes that Extreme removes the irony and makes the show a straightforward, huge production value, feel-good show. He sees the show as partly makeover, partly competition, with "a certain comic reveal, as in 'What on earth have my neighbors done to my house?' They've stripped out what I argue are the most interesting parts of the show's DNA, and replaced them with this huge sense of 'We can make life good for you.'" While Extreme's set-up is more emotionally engaging than a lot of the British shows, Catliff says, "That doesn't have repeatability, and you can't do that every week forever - playing the same trick."

While the more rigid formats can have an exceptional run, Drobnyk finds they can be short lived: "They become predictable in terms of the beats." Even with TLC's own "beloved Trading Spaces," the swap-homes-and-redecorate-with-$1,000 show, Drobnyk says "we're needing to serve up that - but also formats that have more."