Creepy crawly cable

It's not just cable anymore, it's all manner of beastly productions and hare-brained schemes coming to cable. The buzz: Who will be the network to have the next South Park?

By ERIC DEGGANS

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 17, 2000

[Photo: USA] Thomas Calabro stars in They Nest.

PASADENA, Calif. -- The kindest thought I could summon, between stifled giggles, was that this must have made sense on paper.

The thought came while standing inside a cavernous meeting hall at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel last week, watching an internationally acclaimed chef cook up a wok full of crickets.

Arranged to promote the USA Network's unintentionally hilarious disaster movie about man-eating cockroaches, They Nest, the demonstration by insect chef David George Gordon symbolizes the cable channel's horribly lowbrow slate of new shows.

The crowd of journalists piled into USA's two-hour-plus presentation at the Television Critics Association's summertime press tour had shrunk to dangerous proportions. Our colleagues had been sent fleeing by mirthless video clips from The War Next Door (a secret agent's retirement to suburbia shatters when his nemesis moves next door!) and Manhattan AZ (a big-city cop moves to an oddball Arizona town; think a vulgar Northern Exposure in the desert).

By the time Gordon offered samples of his cricket and pasta hors d'oeuvres -- flavored with dried ants, of course -- all but a handful of critics had departed.

Perhaps that's why USA Cable president Stephen Chao used this icky interlude as cover to duck out. Otherwise, he'd have to explain how lame-o fare such as Manhattan AZ, War Next Door (both premiering July 23) and the female bounty hunter adventure The Huntress (premiering July 26) could possibly make up for the loss of three World Wrestling Federation shows in September.

USA sued the wrestling behemoth when it cut a deal with CBS/Viacom to move cable's top-rated shows to the Nashville Network. "I cannot comment on the past and present litigation with the WWF," is all that Chao would say. "With or without the WWF, we're moving forward."

It's a tough break for USA.

It also highlights a central goal for every competitive cable channel: The search for a signature show.

You've seen them: programs that can literally define a cable channel overnight, drawing critical buzz, viewer eyeballs and a thematic focus.

For Comedy Central, it was the profane cartoon South Park, which neatly encapsulated the channel's risk-taking ethic, potty-mouthed comedy and bargain basement production values. On A&E, it was the personal documentary Biography, which brought textured, engrossing tales from the lives of performers, celebrities and historical figures.

So it's no surprise that at this schmooze-a-thon, the cable industry has one focus: selling the press on a signature show. And the bug cuisine wasn't the only thing that strained credulity.

Executives at the Disney Channel kept trying to convince us that the concept behind In a Heartbeat, about high school-age emergency medical technicians, is based in fact.

Yes, they said, such teenage EMTs answer emergency calls in California, Connecticut and Virginia, among other places. But that didn't make the idea of cheerleaders and football players running off the field to help a car accident victim any easier to swallow.

"What they found was . . . the kids were more responsible than some of the adult volunteers," swore executive producer Richard Pierce. "That was pretty amazing."

Robert Wagner, Faye Dunaway, Shelley Winters and Ron Liebman were at the press tour to publicize the Aug. 12 debut of American Movie Classics' Backstory series about stories behind great films such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Poseidon Adventure.

The celebrity panelists agreed mostly on one thing: Talking too much about the stories behind the movies isn't that great an idea.

"This business is magic, really," Wagner said. "If you keep interfering with that . . . showing people how we do these things . . . that takes away from it a great deal. We're in show business. . . . It's our secret, really."

Juiced by a new focus on glamor, celebrity and beauty, the Travel Channel hopes to borrow a signature figure from corporate cousin Animal Planet. They've snared crocodile hunter Steve Irwin for Croc Hunter Holiday, a show airing Sept. 11 documenting a trip Irwin and his family take across his Australian homeland.

Animal Planet also announced a partnership with Universal Studios to create attractions dubbed Animal Planet Live at theme parks in Orlando and Hollywood, Calif. The attractions, due to open next spring, will be based on series such as Emergency Vets, Wild on the Set and Crocodile Hunter.

The channel has even groomed a backup for Irwin in Ian Gordon, a charismatic Australian shark expert who hosts Shark Gordon, a series in which Gordon handles sharks the same way Irwin wrangles snakes and crocodiles.

"People like to see us risking some damage to ourselves, sure," Gordon allowed. "But sharks aren't as bad as people say they are. The most dangerous thing you'll ever do in your life is turn the ignition key and drive out the driveway."

At Comedy Central, despite plans to reteam Absolutely Fabulous co-stars Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders in a new British sitcom called Mirrorball (expected in 2001), the channel's other new wares seemed focused on its core demographic: geeky white guys.

The proof is in Battlebots (a new fall series featuring fight-to-the-death battles between robots built by people off the street) and TV Funhouse, a new series from comedy writer Robert Smigel, creator of animated film shorts for Saturday Night Live and former head writer at ABC's ill-fated The Dana Carvey Show.

For Smigel, creator of Late Night With Conan O'Brien's Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog and SNL's Ambiguously Gay Duo cartoon, Comedy Central offers a chance to experiment without fear of quick cancellation.

"I went into prime time TV with (Carvey), a big star, and at the first sign of trouble the network panicked," said Smigel, who plans to continue work on O'Brien's show (he also performs skits with his lips superimposed over President Clinton's photo, Clutch Cargo-style) and SNL.

"Of course, once the public hears stories about cigars and stains and the president, it's so infantile and filthy, it loosens things up anyway," the writer added with a laugh. "After that, it's hard for TV networks to say, "We must behave in a proper way . . . like the president would.' "

And of course, no desperate plea for viewers is complete these days without more reality TV series. Among them: Popstars, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a female pop band based on a New Zealand series and due to air next year on the WB; Greenlight, a series chronicling the making of an independent film, produced for HBO by stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for 2002; and The Scariest Places on Earth, a Fox Family Channel series that will eventually challenge a family to spend one week in a haunted castle. Big Brother, look out.

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