Why do we have to import stupid things from abroad when the supply is good enough at home?" That was the conclusion of a review published by a leading Hungarian internet portal, discussing the local version of Married… with Children in 2006 (Szabózé 2006. The critic's sarcastic remark clearly illustrates typical beliefs regarding television, scripted formats, and adaptation, and describes the cultural climate around Hungarian screen production at that time. Sitcom as the leading genre of mainstream television fiction is nothing more than lazy entertainment. Domestic adaptations and local versions of fashionable products from the international market are doomed to failure, due to the lack of local talents and the problems and limits of adaptability. We are surrounded by stupiditywhy to add any more? It would be easy to attribute the tone of the review to the cynicism of the trend-setting portal and its journalists, or the overall sense of belatedness and underdevelopment of Hungarian popular culture. I would rather use this quote as a simple marker of ambiguity regarding the uncontrollable flow of hybrid media content and the sign of uncertainty about the evaluation of local content and cultural proximity. The distinction between and the segmentation of 'local', 'domestic' and 'global', 'non-local' or 'basic' is almost impossible, and no format bibles or license agreements can solve (at best, they can only reduce) this problem. It is not surprising that the term complexity appears so often in discussions of the global flow of television formats. As Tasha Oren and Sharon Shafaf argued in the introduction of their edited book on the subject: "No televisual shift has so shaken traditional scholarly models as the explosion in the first decade of the second millennium of global television format circulation" (Oren -Shafaf 2012: 2). While format trade itself has a long history, even the new era of format frenzy, which began in the 1990s, has lived different stages and can be discussed along with varied types and genres of formats (Esser 2013, Moran 2013, Ellis -Esser -Gutiérrez Lozano 2016). Jean K. Chalaby, examining the 'late rise' of scripted formats in the overall history of format trade, highlighted "that their adaptation is more complex than for other genres. The knowledge transfer cannot be as perfunctory as with formulaic formats, and with the reception of scripted entertainment being always uncertain, the risk remains substantial." (Chalaby 2016: 4) This complexity and unpredictability is an obvious challenge for the scholarly analysis of scripted formats, especially in the case of transnational adaptations or television series remakes (Fickers -Johnson 2010, Perkins -Verevis 2016, Bondebjerg 2016, Wells-Lassagne 2017). The situation will be even more complex when it comes to a region undergoing fast and hectic transformations, such as Eastern Europe. The robust legacy of socialist television is not a closed part of the past, nor is the period of the post-socialist transformation which is often interpreted as a...