On Television

...At the last minute, however, NBC managed to snag its own imported stomach-turner, Chains of Love, at a ridiculous price...

...A few nights later it started to tail off steeply...

...He could just as well have been speaking of today's television audiences, though, especially the young who are the target of advertisers, and therefore of TV executives who live or die by their ability to deliver those aged 18 to 34 to Madison Avenue...

...As deadlines approached, discussions became more restricted...

...Within a week, press reports were calling Big Brother an expensive failure...

...For eight or 10 preceding weeks the network's chief programmer, whatever his title, would consider his options: which programs were strong enough to renew: which of the many new offerings laid out would replace those beingjettisoned...

...Thus was it determined that a program of a certain sort would surely carry its audience into a program of another sort...

...But does the trend indicate a drying-up of our creative juices...

...Among his discoveries: 71 Degrees North, from Norway...

...place them on a deserted island off the Malaysian coast without any amenities, such as telephones, electricity or hot water...

...after all, its ratings had convinced marketers that network TV could still pull the enormous audiences it used to, and that they were young, young, young...

...Although Big Brother has not been the hoped for hit, it is a good investment: ratings have risen—especially among the gold-bearing young—wherever CBS has placed it...

...Media buyers and other experts were quoted hailing the magical transformation of CBS...

...Ultimately, the whole process was like playing chess in three dimensions...

...In those days a network's schedule was held to be no less important a secret than the decision of an automobile maker's new model...

...The Fox show began with an elimination process—accompanied by much leering and innuendo—to choose the woman that a man said to be worth seven figures would marry...

...Just as in 1999, a troubled American network, this time CBS, sought salvation by buying the rights to a popular European television show, Survivor...

...There was an elimination, as with Survivor, but the voters were not participants, they were members of the audience polled by telephone...

...It, too, is very popular with young people...

...They could be asked about anything, were merely required to choose among four given answers, and could avail themselves up to three times of various assistances, like telephoning a knowledgeable friend or asking the studio audience for its consensus...

...At NBC, meanwhile, meetings were held...

...Scholarly students of the popular arts smirked about reverse cocacolanization...

...And, consequently, to the observer...

...Continue the process until one person is left—who wins $ 1 million...

...But their current floundering shows how more than ever they are beholden to the vagaries of popular taste for their livelihoods, their expense accounts, their stock options, and their parking privileges...

...When another European program of the new genre became available, NBC was thought likely to grab it...

...Survivor is our cultural gift from the Swedes...

...The BBC's Moscow correspondent, a Scot with a pronounced burr, was decked out in a Regis shirt and tie to report on Vladimir V Putin's State of Russia address to the Duma...

...They remind me of a joke about a movie featuring some girls at a swimming hole who begin to undress as a freight train comes between them and the camera...

...Time was when picking and slotting a network's programs for the next season was a ritual of pomp and solemnity...

...This being a slow summer for foreign news, the Washington Post sent one of its vaunted foreign correspondents to scout out what fresh offerings we might expect...

...The editor of the trade newspaper Variety mocked European Union governments, especially France, for resisting American cultural imports...

...At CBS no one was resting either...

...Over 15 million watched the first night of Survivor...

...Others thought audiences might flinch at the public humiliation of the ousted contestants...

...Moreover, the magic rubbed off on the whole network...

...Once a schedule was announced, it was set —not quite in concrete, but at least in baked clay, like cuneiform...

...Last May, when the networks announced their schedules for 2000-01, the tone of the upcoming season could be discerned in ABC's increasing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire from three times a week to four, and NBC's cutting its news magazine Dateline from four times a week to three...

...It had little effect...

...It differed from the well-remembered quiz programs of the scandal days in that contestants were not expected to be specialists in any one subject...

...But with the passing of its founding generation it fell on harder times—first at the hands of a professional investor who reduced both its assets and its reputation for quality, and next under the leadership of various professional managers who, in the current corporate manner, valued efficiency more than tradition...

...The program's scenario was simple: Divide 16 people into two "tribes...

...This attempt to create and exploit someone else's notoriety turned out to be one more major embarrassment for Rupert Murdoch's network...

...The network that dominated the ratings for most of the '90s had been outplayed by each of its rivals...

...One expert postulated that people did not watch what they most liked but the least objectionable program in each time period...

...In the '60s, its chief programming executive was reportedly fired despite achieving several years of ratings leadership because the audience he enticed was too old...

...For $20 million it bought the American rights to yet another foreign program called Big Brother...

...They are certainly not Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation" or the generation after that, or the generation after that...

...Las Vegas bookies posted odds and took bets on the next person to be thrown off the island...

...The current act of the comedy began last summer, after ABC suffered a September to May season so unsuccessful in corralling the capricious generation that the network actually depressed the stock of its parent, the Walt Disney Company...

...Heads were sure to roll...

...The winner would walk away with only half a million dollars...

...They protested feebly that in its various European manifestations the program had also experienced a viewer drop-off after the initial episodes...

...Many of them have TV cameras of their own, take pictures of their children being bathed, at nursery school graduations, growing up...

...New offerings included two comedies done in animation, plus sitcoms starring Hollywood celebrities like Bette Midler, lohn Goodman and Geena Davis—and Deadline, an NBC adventure series sure to be confused with Dateline...

...Boot Camp, from the British company that gave us Upstairs, Downstairs...

...But the Millionaire show, as media insiders took to calling it, had even greater ramifications...

...It was known, with assistance from its publicity machinery, as the "Tiffany" network—after the jeweler, not the glass stainer...

...If you came into his office on other business, he ostentatiously pulled the cord and the drape swung swiftly shut...

...Some critics thought viewers might be squeamish at seeing the contestants eat large, fat, squirming beetle larvae or spitroasted rats...

...Navy Seals' Hell Week...

...One man saw the movie over and over, insisting the train could not always be on time...

...Contestants subjected to physical ordeals in the Scandinavian wilderness, under the watchful eyes of TV cameras...

...and require one tribe to compete against the other in some contest reminiscent of "color war" at children's summer camps...

...Wanted, from Britain...

...Puts 20 contestants through the "physical and psychological equivalent of the U.S...

...In addition, CBS had almost always attracted an older audience than its rivals...

...From the slough of despond in 199899, ABC vaulted to the top network rating for 1999-2000...

...But ABC got there first...

...End each installment with the losing tribe voting out one of its members, while the rest state their reasons...

...Their wedding was held before the cameras in one of the most watched programs of recent years...

...In the medium's earliest days, CBS set the standards for news responsibility and entertainment quality...

...Now his formula phrases on the quiz program—notably, "Is that your final answer...

...Millionaire, as noted originated in Great Britain...

...Even their parents do not remember when there was no television...

...Called Mole, it was much like Survivor, except that in each tribe there was an agent provocateur working at the behest of the producers who tried to sow dissension and generate conflict...

...The record total taken in was $8.7 billion, with $700 million going to ABC for Millionaire alone...

...His TV uniform, a solid-colored shirt with a shiny, matching solid-colored necktie, has been adopted by politicians and on-air journalists...

...Fox is negotiating...

...One freshman program executive, as mil of himself as a freshly commissioned second lieutenant, had a heavy drape installed in front of the felt board he used to move around the rectangles representing the shows he might or might not present next season...

...have entered the language...

...the gossip was only about whose and when...

...Contestants try to flee police, bounty hunters and even members of the audience choosing to join in the chase...

...anàThe $64,000 Question, Cheers and Seinfeld...

...Anyway, who are today's young...

...The program was scheduled to run five or six nights a week for three months, with each day's doings recorded on tape and edited into an hour or half-hour for broadcast the next day...

...But all did poorly: None will be seen again when the next "new season" begins in September after the Olympics...

...When advertisers grew sophisticated enough to target the public they desired, CBS had a serious problem...

...Because everybody was making money, few begrudged ABC's bonanza...

...In September it was slotted into the new season's schedule three times weekly, charging premium prices for commercials...

...Sir Walter Scott was referring to women when he spoke of the "uncertain, coy and hard to please...

...This placed five men and five women in a high-tech house—that is, one with cameras and microphones everywhere, even the in the two (!) bathrooms...

...Who Wants to Many a Multi-Millionaire...

...Big Brother came from Holland and Mole from Belgium...

...So did CBS' expensively revamped and perpetually troubled Early Show—especially each Thursday, when it featured the previous evening's reject reliving his, or her, humiliation...

...They are the surfers of the Internet, where on numerous sites people offer their most intimate moments for viewing by those willing to list their credit cards...

...Then there was what must be termed a miracle...

...Newspapers queried readers and people "in the street" about who they thought should be booted...

...Winners or losers, all the programs dedicated to the new reality of network television, particularly Big Brother, seem to hark back to the public television documentary series of 1973, An American Family, which had film cameras following a supposedly ordinary household through a lot of tribulation...

...World, although there are no prizes and other gimmicks are eschewed as well...

...Or whether the program executives who confidently and bravely stitched together those schedules in May will still be at their old jobs...

...force them to supplement their meager rations with whatever the land yields...

...After all, three networks have become six, the number of TV stations as well as the number of program syndicators supplying them have increased exponentially, and cable needs a vast amount of video entertainment...

...The present climate of uncertainty is such that there is no way to predict the shows that will be on the network schedules come late September, the official start of the new season...

...A network stood by its schedule, and a programmer's job was, for television, relatively secure...

...Those who did saw a few seconds behind the actual event showing how the producers and editors could avoid nudity, profanity and other undesirable material...

...An animal rights organization protested the treatment of the rats that were eaten...

...CBS' program executives, who had been feeling secure for months, were back to suffering headaches and bad stomachs...

...No moving a hit show from one slot to another to confound the competition, as ABC has often done with Millionaire...

...Naturally, the theorizing included how a program would fare against the presumed offerings by the other networks...

...And that a new program considered likely to help should be scheduled into the "valley" between two programs of established popularity...

...As their most popular established programs went down before the simpleminded British import, each of the other networks developed a big-money quiz show...

...To blunt the impact, ABC twice scheduled Millionaire opposite it and twice Survivor emerged unvanquished...

...Perhaps they are simply being spread too thin...

...My guess is the attraction of these programs is what devotees hope they will see, despite their knowing TV would never allow it...

...That the groom proved to be a fraud and the marriage a fiasco dominated the news for weeks, with a climax of sorts reached when the lady did a star turn on the cover and in the centerfold of Playboy...

...The opening episode, introducing the 10 as they moved into their house, was broadcast immediately following that week's Survivor, guaranteeing a large audience...

...Cameras were placed in the bathrooms, the world was assured, not to capture any personal activities there but to discourage conspiratorial meetings that might try to manipulate what was seen or who won...

...With almost no advance hype it was an instant hit, and ABC ran it several times a week all that summer...

...the second Wednesday night attracted 18 million...

...No installing a series for a few weeks, and even that subject to audience response, as CBS has done with Big Brother...

...As summer waned there were rumors of high-level screaming matches at NBC and impending firings...

...NOT UNTIL Survivor was aired did the situation change...

...Once members of the group were cast out one by one the ratings picked up again, they noted, expressing confidence that this would be the case here...

...If the programmer had not himself been a statistics major, he had a vice president who was, and they would develop the theories and jargon one expects from Wall Street investors who arm themselves with charts...

...Insiders insisted this was another of the "reality" shows spreading over American network television, presumably because it did not seem to be scripted and the participants did not know how it would turn out...

...From Wednesday to Wednesday the young— and golden—audience grew, until by August 23, when the first round of Survivor ended, it had become legendary, like M*A*S*H and Dallas...

...These were expectable...

...These days, the programming executive still in his job when the new season starts in September is the real survivor...

...Purchased by Fox...

...But there is a sort of Heisenberg principle at work here: The act of observation is degrading to the observed...

...Fox, the leader in reality programs with such standouts as When Good Pets Go Bad and Deadly Car Chases, elected to cash in with a one-time-only program...

...But millions uponmillions of predominantly young people gathered around their TV sets every summer Wednesday night...

...Shows might die in their good time, specials might be slotted in to boost ratings during sweeps months, but otherwise a schedule was a schedule...

...Does it matter that the latest reality programs did not spring from the frenzied imaginations of American television producers, whose creativity had given us Stop The Music and Beat the Clock, Today and Tonight, Dragnet and Bonanza, What's My Line...

...Interestingly, few took early advantage of Big Brother's invitation to watch a continuing stream of video images and sounds from the house by clicking on www.bigbrother2000.com...

...As spring moved into summer, lightning struck again...

...More recently the cable music network, MTV, has been presenting something similar to Big Brother called The Rea...

...To inject a little life into a dismal lineup of low-rated repeats, ABC bought the rights to a British TV quiz called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire...

...And after decades as a TV journeyman, Regis Philbin, the host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, became a full-fledged star...

...David Letterman on Late Night, who for several years had been locked in an unequal contest with Jay Leno on NBC's Tonight, experienced a significant audience increase...

...More important to those nervous about their future, the networks sold all the commercial spots they were willing to offer at that time, the so-called "up front" sales, as soon as they were available...

...To them, nothing we now see on television is alien...