When Good Networks Go Bad

By Joel Stein and Jeanne McDowell

It's oddly compelling to watch network television die. Executives whine about straying advertisers, overbid on sports and berate the Nielsens. Best of all, they're willing to air just about anything. You've got footage of a family caught on top of a rampaging circus elephant? A man urinating in the office coffee pot? Twentysomethings shooting milk out of their tear ducts for distance? The nets can probably squeeze any of that in the slot between DiResta and Malcolm & Eddie. Cable used to be the frat basement of television, full of "Skinemax" and foul-mouthed comics, but now you turn to the double digits for CNN, Bravo or American Movie Classics. The cheap thrills are invading network television, under headings like When Good Pets Go Bad, World's Scariest Police Chases and, thanks to a rare kind of genius, the upcoming Cheating Spouses: Caught on Tape. Everyone else can just throw away those MacArthur grant applications now; the Cheating Spouses guy gets it.

Beginning next week, which by chance kicks off sweeps month, the networks will run a record number of these so-called shockumentaries. It's not just Fox, which has ruled the genre, but also ABC, NBC, UPN and even PBS (Nova has a four-parter called Escape! Because Accidents Happen). Most of these shows (except the Nova series) come from four Los Angeles producers: Bruce Nash, Erik Nelson, Brad Lachman and Eric Schotz. They carry out the networks' belief that the only TV young men will watch is extremely violent events shown two or three times in slow motion. When Jerry Springer's "Mom, Will You Marry Me?" begins to bore, and viewers get antsy during the expository, nonpixelated portions of Cops, these guys can deliver that male audience advertisers are desperate to reach.

Nash is one of the most prolific of the producers, having poured out 30 specials in the past five years, as well as the upcoming Fox show Cheating Spouses and ABC's World's Deadliest Storms Caught on Tape (which will air on Feb. 18, before the final part of the Stephen King mini-series Storm of the Century). In addition, Nash--who is also developing sitcoms--has a whole new series, World's Most Amazing Videos (previously promoted as World's Scariest Videos), premiering on NBC on March 3. It's kind of like World's Funniest Videos, with the keen distinction that on the new series, men don't get hit in the crotch on purpose.

Sitting in his office in Los Angeles, Nash, 51, and his three producers, including his daughter Robyn, 30, view extraordinarily violent and vulgar tapes. (Against all odds, shockumentaries can bring families together.) In one particularly gripping tape, a Brazilian crowd flees a fireworks display gone haywire. "That's amazing," Nash says. "Do we know if anyone got hurt?" NBC, like Fox, the network Nash usually works with, is squeamish about showing major injuries. The Brazilian scene is accepted, not only because it passes the no-maiming criterion but also because it--as Nash explains it--"tells a story." A tape of a fight between fraternity boys and locals at a football game fails because it's "nothing more than random violence. It has no redeeming value." In hell, apparently, there are 200 different words for hot.

Nash argues (and has an award from the L.A.-based William Parker Police Foundation to prove it) that his shows consist of tiny, 1 1/2-min. morality plays--Cops redrawn for those who just don't have the attention span. But even he sometimes apologizes for his art form: "It's certainly not what I want to be my legacy, but there's an audience out there. Is it my proudest achievement? No." Perhaps it's Breaking the Magician's Code, which was the highest-rated special in Fox history.

But Nash is right about the audience. This past November, the last time Fox ran four weeks of shockumentaries against NBC's Thursday-night lineup, it beat the peacock network in males 18 to 49 and adults 18 to 34. John Miller, NBC's executive vice president of advertising, promotion and event programming, admits that he went to Nash after losing those nights. "The Fox specials are edgier than what we're going to do, but they did very well going up against our Thursday nights," he says. Moreover, an hour of shocks costs only $500,000, about a third of what it costs to make the average drama. Producers pay relatively small amounts for tapes from local TV-news stations, foreign news services, surveillance-camera outfits, police departments, private investigators and, of course, people with videocameras and a stomach for violence. Then they spice them up with sound effects and voice-overs ("Frieda had a rap sheet a mile long," an animal expert says of a marauding circus elephant).

While Nash has mastered the cinema verite of violence--kids being torn into by pit bulls, head-to-head collisions of tractor trailers, elephant-on-elephant violence--Nelson's company, Termite Art Productions, has focused on grossing people out (though it also makes programs for PBS). His Busted on the Job specials highlight food employees hocking loogies into tacos and an uber-Dilbertian secretary defecating on her boss's chair. Nelson's new Busted Everywhere for Fox is more of the same. He doesn't go along with Nash's excuses about storytelling or moralizing. "We thought it was funny footage of employees acting stupid," he says. "I like to think of Busted as tapping into the mojo of There's Something About Mary. That same sort of brilliant stupidity." It more successfully taps into the mojo of You'll Never Eat Out Again.

But when talking about his new practical-joke show, UPN's RedHanded, Nelson, 43, gets as didactic as Nash. "We're creating a morality play. But the person isn't aware it's a morality play," he explains. "It's Candid Camera meets Seinfeld meets The Truman Show." Meets something really, really stupid.

Schotz, the 41-year-old CEO of LMNOP (Leave My Name Off Productions), corners the freak-show stuff, concocting faster-paced versions of That's Incredible! His Fox series Guinness World Records: Primetime features oddities like worm-eating contests and the world's largest tumor, and his upcoming Fox special World's Most Shocking Medical Videos has footage of a woman's nose being regrown on her forehead. Schotz also makes the more wholesome Kids Say the Darndest Things and Behind Closed Doors with Joan Lunden. Lachman, who not long ago was known for creating Solid Gold and for winning an Emmy for his coverage of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, is now branded with credits like Fox's When Animals Attack and its upcoming The World's Most Shocking Moments 2: Caught on Tape.

Despite the contributions of these four pioneers, the shockumentary genre is really the child of Mike Darnell, the Fox vice president of specials and alternative programming, who saved the network when it was drowning in failed sitcoms. In 1995, Darnell slotted Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, after which there was no turning back to Herman's Head. The next year, after seeing Nelson's World's Most Dangerous Animals, he persuaded Lachman to turn out the edgier When Animals Attack for sweeps. Now Darnell comes up with 75% of the ideas for Fox's reality specials, grateful that the phrases world's most and caught on tape aren't copyrighted. Thirty-six, 5-ft. tall, with curly, flowing hair, Darnell is unapologetic about his shows. "For years Dateline has unabashedly done survivor stories using the exact same footage that we use," he says. "In fact a couple of times they beat me to the punch for footage."

But the Fox exec may have got all he can out of the clip-show format, even though the Spouses show does offer a very promising, Springeresque twist. The genre's leading producers are moving on to the next generation of really ridiculous programming: stunt TV. Nash is bringing back a version of the '50s show You Asked for It, only instead of viewers asking to see the vault at Fort Knox, they'll be treated to five-legged pigs and lady sumo wrestlers. Nelson's next project is Crash Test, in which producers pick things to blow up. (The first two ideas: exploding 1,000 parking meters and throwing a Corvette off a building.) Meanwhile, Lachman is working on a show in which he'll sink a ship and tape it going down in real time. By then, with luck, we'll all be watching cable.