Studio Lambert taking Betty format Stateside

Studio Lambert has teamed with Betty and will take the UK producer’s formats into the US. Betty is best known for creating the Freaky Eaters series about people with unusual eating habits and food phobias. The show airs on TLC in the US, where it is produced by Shed, and BBC Three in the UK and is distributed by DRG.

Betty is also making Channel 4’s controversial upcoming series Beauty and the Beast in which a person with physical disfigurements lives in a house with a ‘very attractive’ person in an attempt to reveal attitudes to personal appearance and vanity.

Studio Lambert said it will work with Betty’s existing formats and add to its slate with a view to getting US shows away.

All3Media-backed Studio Lambert started out in London in 2008 before opening a US office later the same year. It has fared well in the US with several shows on cable, Undercover Boss on CBS and sister show to the workplace format in the works. Company founder and ex-RDF executive Stephen Lambert told TBIvision that the US revenues account for more than those derived in the UK.

“Our format business has really taken off in the last year,’ says Betty CEO Liz Warner, ‘and we felt it was time to find the right US partner.  I’ve known Stephen Lambert for many years and have been hugely impressed by his track record in taking UK formats like Wife Swap and Undercover Boss and making them into big hits.”

Stephen Lambert said; “We are committed to bringing some of the most successful and daring formats in the UK to the states. Liz and her business partner, Walter Iuzzolino, are two of the most creative people working in British television right now and Eli [Holzman] and I look forward to working with them on producing their shows for American audiences.”