Short Takes - April 15, 2006

- Coming this summer All Star Big Brother and you get to choose: Apparently nobody sent Mrs. Moonves the memo that said that Survivor All Stars stank because there will be an All Star Big Brother this summer. Fans will get to choose the contestants from a pool of 20 previous houseguests. I actually have a group of dysfunctional individuals who I would like to see in the Big Brother shack. They include Kaysar from last season (who was run out of the house not once but twice, the second time immediately after the great American Public voted him back in with the cry of "This is our game not America's game"); one legged Eddie McGee, winner of the first season, Tonya from season 3 (who organised the infamous "peanut butter bikini affair"), "Evil" Doctor Will, the winner of Season 2, Jack the FBI guy, his in-house bed buddy Erika, and Allison the slut from Season 4 (and Amazing Race 5), from and of course Chicken George from Season 1. I'm willing to bet that more than half of those people won't even be asked.

- NBC's new 900 pound canary; what will the other networks do?: There are already rumours that ABC is running scared about the prospect of Sunday Night Football on NBC. According to the rumour printed in The New York Post the "alphabet network" (as "scribes" are wont to call ABC perhaps because it increases their word count) is considering moving either Grey's Anatomy or Desperate Housewives - or both - to Monday nights. For the article the Post interviewed Marc Berman of Mediaweek who said, "I can't imagine ABC would move 'Housewives' because it's anchoring Sunday nights and is already working at 9 p.m., so why move it? "They could move 'Grey's Anatomy' to Mondays at 9 since they don't have football there anymore and they need to build that night ... and set up a long-term schedule." Berman also suggested that either show would not be moving to Thursdays because "Thursday would be dead-in-the-water for them." I mention this because John Doyle from Canada's national newspaper, the Globe & Mail, mentioned on Thursday (as part of a piece on the return of Commander-in-Chief to the lineup and the rough ride that show has had after its debut with huge ratings - not a mention of the fact that it isn't very good being as part of the problem of course) writes "And don't expect Commander-in-Chief to return to Thursday nights next season. The prevailing rumour is that ABC wants to move Grey's Anatomy into the time slot in order to compete with ER and crush it." (This article isn't available online unless you're willing to pay the Globe & Mail $14.95 a month - I'm not.) Of course the viewers might have a little something to say about this - while the ratings for Commander-in-Chief's Thursday debut were the lowest the show has had, it improved over its lead-in American Inventor and finished second beating a repeat of ER but not a new episode of Without a Trace.

I think that ABC would be dumb to move either or both shows from their Sunday night line up. These are shows that skew heavily to the young female demographic which will be going opposite the male skewing football. Monday might work but that's already a tough night with CBS's Monday comedies and CSI: Miami which people - for reasons not entirely known or understood by me - seem to like. Still this speculation has me thinking about what the other networks might do up against NBC's gorilla. I don't see CBS making any radical changes - their made for TV movies have been a staple there for decades. Nor do I expect Fox to do anything with their animation/comedy block at least until something goes wrong. The network I think has the most potential to try to shake things up - if they want to and are able to - might be The CW. What if they were to move WWE Smackdown from Friday to Sunday. They don't have anything in the Sunday time slot anyway with the imminent departure of Charmed so why not move a show that's popular with the younger end of the male 18-49 demographic in there and try to take a bite out of the football audience? I'm not offering this as rumour or speculation except as something I might do if I were an evil network weasel.

- Fight the good fight: The four major networks have announced that they will appeal the fines levied against ABC, CBS and Fox - NBC is filing as an intervener in the other cases since the FCC didn't fine them.The major thing in this battle isn't that the networks are appealing the decision it is that they are each joined in the case by their affiliate organizations and by the Hearst-Argyle Television group which owns affiliates of five of the six current broadcast networks. The appeal is aimed at overturning a 2004 decision which found that tightened up indecency regulations tot he point where the use of certain expletives - regardless of the situation - would be deemed profane and obscene. In a statement the appellants claimed "In filing these court appeals we are seeking to overturn the FCC decisions that the broadcast of fleeting, isolated - and in some cases unintentional - words rendered these programs indecent." This appeal does not touch on the recent FCC decision against the CBS show Without A Trace or the former WB show The Surreal Life 2. Naturally PTC head kahuna Brent Bozell has something to say about this: " "It's beyond preposterous that the networks would even propose that airing the 'f-word' and 's-word' on television is not indecent. The networks' principles have now been unmasked for everyone to see. Their actions today are indecent in and of themselves."

- I think I'm going to start calling Brent Bozell "Barney": It seems that the fearless leader of the Parents Television Council has opted to mobilize his legions against MTV for committing blasphemy. The object of his righteous wrath is a show called Popetown which depicts the Pope as, in the words of the PTC "an uncontrollable, infantile character who pogo-sticks around a Vatican populated by corrupt, money-grabbing cardinals," and in one scene has Jesus (a statue I assume) coming down off the cross to watch TV because, as he says, "It's better than hanging around." Bozell writes, “When foreigners see shows like this, they are getting the worst of the very worst of American culture. No wonder so many hold us in contempt." Of course this is totally different from the protests over the cartoons of Mohammed: "This is yet another example of how some in Hollywood are spitting on religious figures and showing their contempt for people of faith. The cartoons about Mohammed may have been in bad taste but they were political satire. This is worse. This is ridicule for the sake of ridicule. And not coincidentally they’re doing this during Easter week, the holiest week in the Christian year.” Setting aside the fact that ridiculing the leader of a great world religious sect is probably not as major a thing as depicting the founder of one of the great world religion as a suicide bomber, it's absurd to say that the latter is legitimate political satire while the former is - as the headline for Bozell's statement puts it - blasphemy. Besides which I don't see anything in the PTC's raison d'etre that has anything to do with protecting religion from blasphemy or ridicule, let alone one specific religion (Christianity - remember Bozell said that the Mohammed cartoons were just political satire not blasphemy; presumably anyone who disagreed was just overly sensitive).

But here's the kicker and the bit that gets Bozell the "Barney" monicker. You won't be seeing Popetown on MTV unless you live in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. It isn't airing in the United States. It isn't even an American show - it was created in Britain (where the BBC received so many protests that they refused to air it) by a company called "Channel X", and was first seen on New Zealand's C4 network which is owned by the Canadian company Canwest. Apparently either Bozell and the PTC think that they should be spreading their revolution for broadcast decency - as interpreted by the PTC of course - around the world, or in the grand tradition of Barney Fife Bozell wants to "nip it in the bud" before it gets a chance to infect America. "You gotta nip it!"

Big Brother's Latest Twist *Yawn*

The other day I had to go down to see my financial advisor to go over my mutual funds and make a couple of changes. Dean's a nice guy, a former junior hockey player (just below the pro leagues), and maybe his only flaw is that he seems to think that my kid brother knows more about mutual funds than he does. We decided to reduce my holdings in an International Fund we had both liked earlier because it basically turned out to be a dog, and cut my exposure to a Balanced Fund because of the amount of holdings in bonds that the fund had - bond value goes down as interest rates on new bonds go up. The bulk of my funds are now in a Canadian Equity Fund since neither one of us is too enthusiastic about the US economy - Dean thinks that the US needs to balance the budget and I'm worried that the war isn't helping due to the increase in oil prices (although it does boost the Canadian Equities Fund which has a lot of resource stocks).

Anyway, once the financial matters were worked out, and since I had a half hour appointment, we started chatting about a number of other matters, one of which was Poker. I mentioned that I was playing a lot of poker online and gave him a fairly basic explanation of how it works. He in turn commented on the large amount of poker that is now on TV and wondered whether the return of hockey was going to mean that there would be less poker on the tube. I think he was a bit surprised when I told him that in terms of ratings poker drew better on ESPN than the NHL does (remember he played hockey on a pretty high level). Of course I do expect hockey to return to immense popularity in Canada when it comes back in September or October. Still I don't think that it's going to drive poker off the sports networks in Canada and certainly there's going to be a lot of product coming from the United States.

One thing that Dean mentioned stuck with me. One of the things that he has noticed about poker on TV is that it is easy for the viewers to identify with the players. We learn about their personalities but also about their thought processes. Then he added that he wondered if this helped to explain the popularity of reality shows. Reality shows like Survivor, he feels, allow us to see the personalities of the players, allow us to identify with them, and as a result allow us to choose sides.

Which brings me to the latest "secret" in Big Brother's "summer of secrets". Once the allies of fireman Eric (aka "Cappy") had managed the eviction of Kaysar in revenge for Kaysar getting Eric evicted, everyone in the house learned that one of the evicted houseguests - well three evicted houseguests since Ashlea who was the first out escaped the sequester area and was exposed to the outside world - would be coming back. As people with long lasting memories might recall they used this gimmick in Big Brother 3. That time the people in the house had the final decision after the number of choices had been reduced to two. This time the public gets to choose. You can vote using text messaging, or you can vote online. Apparently with the Internet voting (at the CBS America's Choice website) allows you to vote as many times as you want - I've voted three times in the past two hours. So who are the choices?

Michael: L.A. based artist and Kaysar's partner. Sorry, doesn't stand a chance. He somehow managed to so anger Eric that they nearly came to blows. I'm still not sure how that one happened. Fact is though that he didn't have much personality. He really wasn't much of a player and may have been the only one not to figure out that everyone had a partner within about ten minutes.

Eric: Boston born, Las Vegas Firefighter and Maggie the catty's partner. Frankly he comes across as a petty dictator. His initial fight with Michael - before someone told Eric that Michael had insulted his family - was that Michael's flirting with the women verged on sexual harassment. If Michael was being sexually harassing, then what on earth is Howie doing? His reaction once James won the power of veto ("Take off that Union Hat!" then pulling it off James's head) show a very hot temper. Hot tempers don't make for good players. Maybe that's why Ivette sounds as though she's lost more than Maggie with Eric's departure (and would have lost more with him going than she would if her partner Beau had left) - they have similar temperaments

Kaysar: Graphic designer from Irvine California, but born in Iraq. He's not the most strategic player ever seen - I think it might have been better to get one of Eric's sheep on the block opposite Maggie once James was "saved" and left Eric for later - but he's the most best strategic thinker of the three possibilities. Say whatever else you want about Big Brother in its American incarnation, it is first and foremost about strategic thinking.

I'm not convinced that Dean is right when he says that we see the personalities of the players in a Reality Show. I think that what we see, even in the "confessional" sessions, is what the players their fellow competitors to see. As viewers we don't see the competitors in their real lives. It's sort of like the difference between watching a lion in a zoo as opposed to watching a lion in the wild. We aren't seeing the "houseguests" in their natural habitats anymore than the lion in the zoo is in his natural habitat. The difference is that we can only judge the Big Brother houseguests from their behavior in their "cage". Which may be why I voted for Kaysar three times in the past three hours. I liked the version of him who has been seen on TV better than I like the personas that Michael and Eric have exhibited. Who knows what any of them are like in their "natural habitats"?

Here We Go Again

Is it possible that this is the sixth season of the American version of Big Brother? It seems like only five years ago that we were marvelling to the antics of "Chicken" George and Will "Mega", not to mention the emotional wreck that was Karen. Ah yes, how times have changed.

The truth is that the first season of Big Brother was the only real season of Big Brother that North Americans have ever seen. The show, which had been a huge success in Europe when CBS introduced it in 2000, brought eleven people from across the United States together and locked them in a "house" together under observation 24/7. Based on what people on "the outside" saw they were supposed to phone in and vote for one of two "houseguests" who had been nominated for eviction by the other people "inside." The only problem - well one of the problems - was the show really didn't work in the Unites States. The show's ratings were nothing to write home about, although there are a lot of programmers today who would have loved the numbers that that first season of Big Brother drew. Moreover a lot of the viewers, who had been expecting either the metaphorical second coming or the end of the universe - depending on which critics they were reading - just found the show boring. Part of that could be attributed to the fact that things that could be shown on European and Australian versions of the show - nudity, swearing and generally boorish behaviour - couldn't be shown on American TV. Most importantly the viewers had been given something to compare Big Brother to, a little show that CBS had decided to sacrifice that summer of 2000 called Survivor. The ratings for Survivor were what the network had expected from Big Brother. Indeed even the Big Brother houseguests, who had seen Survivor before they went into the house, were in awe. When two people from the Big Brother house were taken to the Emmys the one thing they talked about afterwards was meeting Survivor Rudy Boesch.

CBS wanted changes made and they made this clear to the shows producers, Arnold Shapiro Productions and the Dutch media giant Endemol Productions. The result made the show more like Survivor to the point where it was a near carbon copy. Instead of challenges just being for food or rewards, one person would become "Head Of Household" (HOH) who got his or her own private room for the week. Instead of the houseguests selecting two people for eviction, that job was given to the HOH. It was the houseguests, not the viewers who were given the task of voting people out - the audience had lost their interactive capacity and were reduced to spectators. The show became at best an inferior carbon copy of Survivor with the players adopting the tactics that Richard Hatch had used so well in the first Survivor (and which most subsequent players have applied so poorly) complete with a final jury vote by evicted houseguests to decide the ultimate winner. The results in terms of ratings were slightly better, but not that much.

Season 3 saw the first of the gimmicks which my friend Ian J. Ball objects to so much. In that season the "Power of Veto" was introduced. It allowed the holder - who won a cheesy looking medallion in a competition - to remove one of the people nominated for elimination from the mix but couldn't be used on yourself until the last time it was used in that season. Moreover at one point during the season, when four players had been eliminated, the one of the evicted houseguests was brought back into the house, ultimately voted back in by their fellow players. If anything ratings for that season of Big Brother were down slightly from the previous year, but close enough to what they had been for the difference to be of little significance. In Season 4 the gimmick was the "X Factor". Several people in the house had been in relationships with other players. These ex-couples (get it) had in fact been recruited because of their previous relationships. There were fireworks - to the point where one of the contestants was removed by the producers after flying into a jealous rage, while the viewers also saw (or rather didn't see thanks to very large comforters and an awareness that they were on camera) a pair of contestants supposedly having sex - but the show had moved far from its roots. The fifth season saw a new gimmick. "Project DNA" actually had two. One contestant discovered that another was a sister he never knew existed, but the major twist was that one player was actually two - identical twin sisters who swapped in and out of the house for several weeks before they were allowed to reveal their secret. They didn't win of course.

This year there's another gimmick of course. Described by CBS as "The Summer Of Secrets" the show has started out with a new "house"; the old one - actually a number of mobile homes put together - was demolished to make room for new CBS offices. This one is apparently at least partially within a soundstage to ensure that there won't be much in the way of interference from the outside world. Unlike previous seasons where the sexes were balanced there are eight women and six men. Apparently one of the contestants is transgendered person. (If so I suspect it's Ivette, who claims to have a secret that none of the others will guess and despite the fact that we see her kiss another woman I don't think it's that she's a lesbian - every season has had at least one gay person in it.) The new house - a two story structure - apparently has secret rooms that the houseguests can discover and there are reportedly trapdoors in the "backyard". But the big "secret" is that the producers have totally abandoned the base concept that all of the contestants are strangers. Each of the contestants is in fact partnered with another person in the house with whom they have a preexisting relationship, but each pair thinks that they're the only ones in that situation. If they can keep the secret throughout the show and are the last two people in the house, the winner will receive $1 million while the runner-up will get $250,000. If a partnership doesn't finish first and second the winner will "only" get $500,000.

It's hard to write a real review of Big Brother based on the first episode. It's not that the show is too complex, it's just that even more than most reality programs this show lives or dies on the quality of the people in the cast and the first episodes presents the viewer with the same dilemma that the initial Head of Household faces in choosing the first nominees for elimination - we know virtually nothing about these people and the structure of the first episode means that we don't get to learn much about most of them. We don't know personalities yet, even though there are some forceful people coming to the fore, like Eric the fireman, and Howie the meteorologist. For now at least the new gimmick adds little to the show, to the point where we don't yet know who is partnered with whom. We don't even know yet how it will affect strategy; in the first episode's combination Food and Head Of Household challenge the optimal strategy for each partnership would seem to be for one partner to be on each team of seven competitors but since we don't know the identity of the partners we don't know if that plan was followed.

For better or for worse, Big Brother is the model for the reality-competition show industry that has grown to such large - and imitative - proportions. It is ironic of course that the show which was innovative in its international incarnations has been reduced to a rather pale imitation of another show in it's American version. Maybe Americans just aren't interested in participating in their own entertainment, although the interactive aspect of the show has successfully imported with American Idol and even Dancing With The Stars. It is also possible, I suppose, that the time wasn't right for the original concept and that if it were introduced today with greater online access (and using toll-free 800 numbers instead of pay to vote 900 numbers) the show as it was created would have been a bigger success. In the end however I think that the original American incarnation of Big Brother "failed" because it was being compared with Survivor. Both the structural changes in the elimination process, and the increasing reliance on gimmicks to keep the show "interesting" and "innovative" are the result. We'll have to see how that works out, but on the whole I feel they should focus more on getting interesting people and less on gimmicks to keep viewers involved.