Cable uses reality shows to pump up ratings

Piling more and more reality shows onto their schedules, often where movies, documentaries, and live or taped performances used to be, cable networks are setting ratings records as they redraw the TV landscape.

Powered by shows such as Intervention, Hoarders, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Gene Simmons Family Jewels, and Billy the Exterminator, A&E, once the snooty Arts & Entertainment Network, wrapped its best ratings quarter ever in March.

The History Channel used series about quirky Las Vegas pawnbrokers and quirkier junkyard scavengers to have its best month ever in April.

On May 3, The Real Housewives of New Jersey became the most-watched Monday night program in the history of Bravo, once cable's premiere location for sophisticated cultural programming.

Other channels that have less serious pasts are finding success with reality, as well. On May 5, Oxygen wrapped Love Games: Bad Girls Need Love Too, the most successful first-year series in its history with the young women it seeks as viewers. That followed the network's best April ever, as Love Games was helped by the latest chapter in the love story of D-list celebrities Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott.

With few exceptions, cable networks are relying on reality fare to attract larger, and younger, audiences. Though it's hard to find much education on TLC (formerly the Learning Channel), whose specials Sunday night, Paralyzed and Pregnant and Pregnant at 70, augment such regular series as Policewomen of Broward County and the coming Toddlers and Tiaras, most of the networks try to hew to at least some of their more respectable foundations.

"You help your own network if you focus on what your audience already likes," says Frances Berwick, executive vice president and general manager of Bravo Media, which tries to stick with affluent (Real Housewives of . . .), aspirational (Top Chef), or arch (Kathy Griffin: Life on the D List) series appealing to the upscale viewers it seeks to sell to advertisers.

Nancy Dubuc, president and general manager of the History Channel, home of American Pickers, Ax Men, and the seminal men-in-demanding jobs show, Ice Road Truckers, says she's always thinking about history. "One of the things that people miss about our shows is the amount of information that's in them. Their topics and the information in them is still decidedly about history."

So, Pawn Stars, which in most recent weeks has been the highest-rated original adult series (not counting wrestling) on all of cable, spends plenty of time analyzing the historically significant items that customers bring in to pawn or sell. It grabs more viewers than PBS's venerable Antiques Road Show, however, because viewers relate to the three-generation family of rough guys - and a goofy, kindhearted, sidekick - running a hock shop in one of the seediest parts of Las Vegas.

It's not a coincidence that these guys generate 50-year-old memories of the Cartwrights on NBC's Bonanza.

"Characters have been important on TV from the moment we turned that switch on," says Dubuc. "Anthology shows, people can tune in and tune out. If you connect to a personality, you'll go along for the ride."

Audrey Marsh of Media, a fan of Deadliest Catch, which lives in the difficult and dangerous world of Alaska crab fishermen, knows what Dubuc's talking about. "I got totally sucked into it once when there was a marathon on Discovery," she says. Now, both she and her husband watch religiously: "It's so silly, but you get to know the people, and then you start caring about them. And I just kept watching. That was, what, two years ago? . . . And the closest I would come to any of those people in my life is buying crab legs at the seafood store."

Producers and programmers bristle at the term reality television, first used in 1978 by Paul L. Klein, NBC vice president of programming, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Klein was referring to Lifeline, an obscure series that followed a different physician in a different city each week. It was canceled after four months because viewers found it depressing and too real.

There's not much chance of that in contemporary reality shows, which people in the business prefer to call "alternative" or "unscripted" TV.

"It's really just entertainment," says Mike Darnell, president of alternative entertainment at Fox. "We look like documentaries, but just like it's not necessary for the scripted shows, it's not necessary for us to be socially relevant. There are lofty dramas and comedies, but being lofty or terrible doesn't dictate how popular you are."

"What on earth does non-scripted, nonfiction drama have to do with reality?" asks Mark Burnett, executive producer of Survivor. "I work in a completely manufactured environment, but the actual responses within the environment are very authentic."

Viewers, even young ones, understand the unreality of reality TV. Gwen Lewis of Overbrook Park, a senior at Friends Central School, says, "Everyone my age who watches reality shows realizes that this isn't the real life of the characters, but it's plausible. There are things you can identify with."

Young people, especially, are drawn to reality programming. Bob DiBitetto, president and general manager of A&E, says it's because "many of these shows . . . give the impression that actual occurrences in somebody's real life are playing out before your eyes. It might be true or not, but the communication to the viewer is that you are in the moment and experiencing whatever the challenge or the emotions might be. . . .

"I cannot overstate the power of the human voyeuristic impulse in television: 'Oh, my God, I don't think I should be seeing this private moment, heightened tension, misery, critical flash point, but I am.' "

"There is still lots of drama, even though it's not a drama," says high schooler Lewis.

Lauren Lexton, who grew up in Philadelphia, co-owns Authentic Entertainment in Burbank, Calif., a major producer of reality TV. She says that she and her colleagues almost never direct action: "If someone's faking or acting, you can tell."

The key work in successful reality shows comes before and after shooting. "These days, we are looking for people who just have a really big personality," says Lexton. "Top Chef, Big Brother, the most popular reality shows, casting is everything to those shows. The people in them are real. They're completely real. If they weren't, you'd see through it in a second."

The stories come out of the editing room. "We film a ton of material," Lexton says. "Ace of Cakes is a perfect example. I was terrified in the bakery. It didn't seem like there was anything going on, [but] we shoot six days for every half hour, and you definitely find a clear story line.

"We have so much footage that when you whittle it down to 22 minutes, it's really interesting and exciting, [but] we really can't make something that doesn't already exist."

Good reality, admittedly an unusual commodity in such a huge pile of low-cost production, has all the same qualities as good scripted drama.

Bravo's Berwick sums it up: "Every successful reality show has drama, suspense, great characters, an emotional resolution."

Reality television may cool from its current white-hot condition. It may even someday cease to be the object of so much scorn, but no one sees it going away.

"I must have read 300 times in the last decade that reality television is dying," says Fox's Darnell. "It's not. It's not a fleeting genre. It has a very broad umbrella: variety, game, professional-style competition, docu-soap, relationship, survival, tough jobs - and sometimes on cable, shows about nothing. It's now just part of TV."