Over the last decade, Ryan O’Dowd has written some of the biggest live moments on television — including those from the past seven years of “Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve With Ryan Seacrest” and awards shows like the CMAs, the Billboard Music Awards and the Emmys. And he’s always loved the rush of live TV.

“I love the immediacy of it,” O’Dowd, president of unscripted at BBC Studios , says. “I loved, as a writer, the ability to have something happen, to react to it, to think of what we could do that would entertain and engage literally within three minutes coming out of a commercial break. We’d come up with the idea to pitch it to the host, have them be behind it, get it into the teleprompter, and have 40,000 people in an arena see it three minutes later.”

This year, the idea that

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