I KNOW A COMEDIAN who moved to L.A. to make it big in showbiz, and who’s currently in day-job work as a crew member on an awful made-for-cable crime show.
He sometimes tells stories about the Hollywood hustler mentality. The way he describes it, it’s even worse than the worst you’ve heard.
Of course, it’s one thing for hundreds of monomaniacal would-be alpha males to scramble around a field with profit potential, such as feature films or boy-band music videos. The hustling takes a different, even more desperate turn when applied in a sub-industry in apparent permanent decline–the production of weekly dramatic TV series.
The old-line networks have been losing audiences to cable and the Net and assorted other time-wasting opportunities. Cable channels will never have the individual reach to support the bloated production budgets producers are used to.
And now, the lure of low-budget entertainment has again reached the old broadcast networks, in the form of a once-moribund genre.
When Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? became a ratings smash in its first two mini-series mountings, the sitcom and cop-show crowd (and their coke dealers and call-girl suppliers) got paranoid, my source claims.
They saw the show as a direct threat to their own livelihoods. If the networks could achieve decent ratings from such low-budget productions, suddenly the careers of a few thousand L.A. “show runners,” producers, writers, set builders, “sticks with tits” beach-babe extras, stars, stars’ agents, stars’ personal trainers, celebrity “news” reporters, etc. etc. would be in dire peril.
So an effort has been made to kill Millionaire, the best way Hollywood knows how. By imitating it to death.
According to my correspondent’s story, production companies didn’t pitch Greed, Winning Lines, and Twenty-One to the networks in hopes these ripoff shows would succeed, but so that there’d be a quiz show glut that would shove Millionaire into a premature grave.
Hmmmm. Reminds me of a conspiracy theory that I once heard about the L.A. record industry.
Something about how, in the early part of the previous decade, the major labels and their fellow-travelers saw indie rock as a threat to the very street-credibility of corporate rock. So, supposedly, the majors signed, groomed and hyped the most derivative faux-“alternative” acts they could find. That way, “alternative rock” would be redefined as just another genre, a fad to be played out and discarded like any other.
There’s just one problem with such a theory: It requires that corporate music bosses be far more intelligent than all evidence has shown them to be.
And from what my comedian acquaintance says about corporate TV guys, they’re apparently not any smarter than corporate music guys.
So I could easily imagine the kill-Millionaire plot backfiring. Perhaps big-money, hard-quiz shows will have a short life atop the ratings. (Certainly the Millionaire knockoffs are all lamer than lame.) But that could just lead to other cheap hits–different types of game shows, or skit comedies, or variety shows, or any of the other assorted value-priced genres that have always been mainstays of TV schedules around the world. Maybe even an English-language Sabado Gigante that would combine all these concepts under one package.
It could result in a more fiscally-stable broadcasting biz, and also in shows that feature a more direct-seeming rapport between performers and audiences, instead of the slick, distanced blandness of most current Hollywood prime-time fare.
And if that happens, you expect the L.A. powers-that-be to get even more paranoid.
TOMORROW: Praying for Turkey.
IN OTHER NEWS: Four years ago, there were six major record companies. Now there are four; as EMI, the company of the Beatles and Edith Piaf, a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents, falls to the consolidators.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The matriarch of NW enviro-activism makes it to a third century but no more.
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