REALITY’S IDENTITY CRISIS

We’d all love to be someone else sometimes.

I wanted to be, variously, a better looking Steve Tyler, Neil Armstrong or that guy from Dawson’s Creek who got to fool around with Katie Holmes all the time… maybe I’ve said too much.

But, it seems the fantasy of getting out from your rut hasn’t been confined to real, living humans – I’ve begun to notice a startlingly similar desire in the Reality TV business.

Those of you who’ve scanned any of my previous blogs will know that I’m out selling shows right now. Part of being a good salesman, as with selling vacuum-cleaners, is to know your buyers – and so a major amount of my time is spent meeting the commissioners, going to events where development execs hang out, getting on the phone for the latest updates with my agent, (where usually I update HIM on the latest trends).

The trick is not to know the ‘corporate direction’ of a network, but to know the ‘feel’ of a network, that little something that makes a show a Nat Geo show over a Discovery Channel show. Mostly, you just can’t put your finger on it, but, (like the vacuum salesman who stumbles across a rich, blind, clean-freak housewife with a particularly dirty carpet), it’s payday when you get this right.

But, recently on sales trips to the East Coast something has changed. It’s like someone turned off my Spidey Sense – because strange things are a-foot. Shows that should have been for one network are no longer required there, but someone else, who six months ago would never have even dreamed of making a particular show suddenly have decided that’s the kind of show they want to make.

It started with History Channel, where a year ago I heard one commissioner say, when I accidentally pitched a show with absolutely NO history content – “You worry about the show, I’ll worry about the History. I can inject history into ANYTHING”. In the year since this meeting, sure enough, AXMEN, UFO HUNTERS, MONSTERQUEST, and the phenomenally successful, ICE ROAD TRUCKERS appeared on the network, (to the highest ratings the channel has ever seen).

This was followed by Court TV suddenly announcing they no longer felt they wanted to be a Crime network, and changed their name to TRU TV. Oprah Winfrey even backed out of her OXYGEN network, because she felt they had strayed too far from the positive female slanted shows of old, with new offerings which include the popular, (but admittedly bitch-slap-filled), BAD GIRL’S CLUB. You’d hear that ‘Discovery want to be Bravo, FX want to be A&E, Showtime want to be USA, History want to be Discovery’ and so on…

The problems all these stations face is simple – at the time, whatever they’re doing to their shows doesn’t seem to be working, so a short sharp, schizophrenic shock changes things up, and the audience come flooding back. Great idea!

Now, unhindered by tradition, a freshly re-branded network can make all those thinly veiled knock-offs of any show on TV that audiences ARE watching. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that ICE ROAD TRUCKERS, with its very similar themes, characters, story arcs, not to mention production teams, as Discovery’s DEADLIEST CATCH, is anything other than truly inspired! I’d imagine it was only a matter of time that History Channel would have come up with that on their own).

Absolutely, just as I can change into my Neil Armstrong costume, (when my other half is out), so can these networks make themselves feel closer to their goal by calling in the most expensive design teams money can buy to swap out their dreary old logos, and replace them with skinny, reflective, spangly new ones. (I have heard that many design companies actually rely on this cycle of identity crises to replenish their bottom lines on a predictable four year rotation).

But, you see, the problem is not that audiences are demanding a cute new logo, and a confusing new tag-line, the problem is that the shows these networks have been desperately putting on, are not very good.

So rather than blame their production teams, the development department or, heaven forbid, themselves, they blame the fact that the logo is ‘not communicating to our core audience anymore’. And given the choice between them or the logo, lobby the shareholders mercilessly to let them bravely move the company forward by even more bravely changing the name and logo of the network. If that doesn’t work, then the audiences simply must have fled somewhere… or popped out to the shops… for 6 months.

My prediction, however, is that this temporary identity shift will last only as long as it takes for those particular shows to get old again. Then what?

My personal feeling is they’ll find that hurriedly slipping out of a milar-jumpsuit and fishbowl helmet and stashing them both behind the boiler in the time it takes for my other half to unlock the front door, is a LOT easier than trying to rebuild a logo or re-re-rebrand again – something which I can only imagine would be as difficult to explain, and as expensive to get out of, as the time I got caught home-alone with that boxed-set of Dawson’s Creek dvds. Now I’ve definitely said too much .