Re: American Idol 2009- Season 8 Thread and Discussion
Here's one of the articles I was looking at:
February 26, 2000
Fox's Point Man For Perversity; 'World's Scariest Programmer,' Starring Mike Darnell as Himself
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI and BILL CARTER
In the cleaned-up new world of Fox television, pet poodles won't attack their owners, fake military surgeons won't perform autopsies on fake aliens, and 303-pound tumors won't be removed from patients on prime-time television.
And if Fox intends to build its reputation not on colliding police cruisers but on quality programming, as Sandy Grushow, the chairman of the Fox Television Network declared two days ago, where does that leave Michael H. Darnell -- the svengali of sometimes gruesome, sometimes comical specials that took television to new heights -- or depths -- of perversity?
Given the corporate climate at Fox, Mr. Darnell, the executive vice president of specials and alternative programming who has faced a storm of criticism for his handling of the highly rated Fox program ''Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?'' will have to rein in his programming style.
Given his history -- this is the man who once considered producing a special called ''The World's Most Embarrassing Throw-up Moments'' -- that may prove challenging.
But Fox might find it difficult to rein him in too far. Mr. Darnell has proved to be a magnificent ratings warrior, with an instinct that imagined the quiz show ''Greed,'' Fox's quick and fairly effective response to ABC's ratings steamroller, ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.''
Fox's move to clean up its brand image may be good public relations but bad business. The network could risk opposition from its affiliates, which depend on big sweeps ratings to set higher advertising rates and capture audiences for their cash cows -- late-night local news.
Still, apart from the ''Multimillionaire'' public-relations Waterloo, there may be other reasons to limit the reality-based programming that has in the past so distinguished Mr. Darnell's career. Even though in-your-face specials have won high ratings among the young males coveted by advertisers, advertisers will not pay as much as they would for a content-based drama. On the other hand, the specials draw higher advertising rates than the weak shows they often replace.
Such is the balancing act Fox faces as it determines Mr. Darnell's status. Mr. Darnell was not talking yesterday but on the day last week that he discovered that Rick Rockwell, the groom, had never informed the show's producers that a former girlfriend had filed a restraining order against him, he said, ''This is the worst day of my life.''
Before the issue of the restraining order ever came to light, Mr. Darnell said that his own instincts had been to choose a rich man who had many millions of dollars, rather than someone with a performance pedigree.
''They should have gone for a guy with money and not a guy in show business,'' he said last week, speaking of Next Entertainment, the production company behind ''Multimillionaire.'' ''The perception is true. Not all millionaires are good-looking. We opted to go for the better-looking, charming man.''
Who could blame Mr. Darnell for seeing the value in a telegenic bachelor? After all, there is good reason for his television instincts. Mr. Darnell, 38, is a child of television. When his family moved to Southern California from Philadelphia when he was 12 years old, he began appearing in commercials and in guest roles on iconic 1970's shows like ''Welcome Back, Kotter,'' ''Sanford and Son'' and ''Kojak.''
Because of his height -- about 5 feet 2 inches -- Mr. Darnell played children in television roles until he was 20. After graduating from California State University at Northridge, he went to work at KTTV, a Los Angeles television station that had just been purchased by Fox.
He began producing Rose Bowl parades, entertainment segments and pre-Emmy programming. But his reputation as a latter-day P. T. Barnum did not begin to grow until he arrived in the Fox specials department in 1994. Mr. Darnell's first major hit was ''Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction'' in 1995. The idea originated when a freelance producer came to him, claiming to have found film from 1947 of an alien autopsy performed by military doctors, shot in Roswell, N.M. Mr. Darnell asked for proof that the tape was indeed as old as the producer claimed, and Eastman Kodak verified that it was, well, if not true, at least old.
''That was enough for me,'' Mr. Darnell said later.
His specials began to pick up pace, with eight in May 1997 -- including ''When Stunts Go Bad,'' ''Busted on the Job,'' and ''World's Scariest Police Chases.'' This last show set a Fox record for the Tuesday night time slot among viewers 18 to 49 years old, earning higher ratings than the World Series game that night.
Mr. Darnell learned to feed off his own material, revealing that the alien autopsy was a hoax in the Fox special ''World's Greatest Hoaxes and Secrets Revealed.'' And he began moving toward softer material, like ''Breaking the Magicians' Code,'' which, while eschewing violence, managed to provoke a frisson of outrage among magicians' groups, who staged an unsuccessful boycott of the program.
Mr. Darnell's penchant for reality-based programming is a cost-effective one, largely dependent on recycled images and cheaply purchased footage that is edited into an eye-catching mix with heart-thumping sound effects. The final result is that an hourlong program can cost anywhere from half to a third the cost of a regular hourlong drama.
That financial strategy, as well as the big ratings, appealed to Peter Roth, the former president of the Fox Entertainment Group, who was replaced in late 1998.
If Mr. Darnell's oeuvre can be characterized as a collection of gross-out shockumentaries and socially unredeeming freak shows in which total strangers passionately kiss and wed on national television, it also shows a seat-of-the-pants sense of invention and resourcefulness.
''Being a young network, we didn't have Miss America or the Oscars,'' Mr. Darnell told The New York Times Magazine in 1998. ''So the thought was, 'How can we invent stuff?' ''
He is not shy about denying the existence of any redeeming qualities to his work.
''I get asked, 'What do you think the social responsibility of your shows is?' '' Mr. Darnell said in the interview with The Times. ''The truth is, I'm in entertainment, not in news. I don't know what the social responsibility of Seinfeld is.''
Inside Fox, there have been questions about whether Mr. Darnell had the moral compass to go along with his unquestioned programming instincts. There have been suggestions that he was so perfectly in sync with the young male audience that watched many of his specials because of his own arrested emotional development. Colleagues described him as a man with the energy, taste and enthusiasms of a teenager.
Mr. Darnell -- who has described himself as ''the opposite of an elitist'' -- has followed a credo of grossing out viewers, of titillating them, of doing anything to make them watch.
''I will do almost anything for a good number,'' he said in a 1998 interview with The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, referring to ratings. ''As long as it doesn't hurt me, the company or my audience. I don't cross into human suffering, making fun of a hurting person.''
Of the 1998 show ''Guinness World Records: Prime Time'' -- in which Mr. Darnell featured a woman undergoing surgery to remove a 303-pound tumor -- Mr. Darnell said, ''You have to have something gross in each episode.''
Mr. Darnell has said in the past that while his programs may attract controversy, they do not hurt people and are not particularly low brow.
''I think people just want to be entertained,'' he said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee last year. ''Sometimes we want a guilty pleasure.'' He added: ''I'm not saying people are dumb. I'm saying people are like me, and I'm not dumb. It's like pizza. It doesn't matter what your SAT scores were or how much money you make, most people like pizza.''
Fox executives are accustomed to keeping Mr. Darnell from following his own instincts too far. Last year, they balked when Mr. Darnell suggested crashing an airplane in the desert. In 1997, Mr. Roth pulled ''Prisoners Out of Control'' -- an hourlong special about violent prison rioting -- calling it ''inappropriate for broadcast.'' They also twice blocked his plans for a show called ''Space Jump,'' which Fox executives rejected in 1997. The program involved flying a man in a weather balloon to a high altitude, after which he parachuted out and went into a free-fall for 17 minutes.
Mr. Darnell has not run every piece of gruesome or titillating footage he could get his hands on. He has, for example, rejected material showing executions, and eventually decided not to run ''The World's Most Embarrassing Throw-up Moments.'' Mr. Darnell soured on the idea not because it was distasteful; he decided against it because the vomiting segments were re-creations, not actual footage.
Executives at other networks said that he would be avidly sought out if Fox ever let him go -- saying he would fit in where his touch with male viewers would be appreciated -- perhaps at UPN or the USA cable network, which has scored big with wrestling.
But there is little evidence that Fox intends to part with Mr. Darnell. Fox executives describe themselves as truly reluctant to let go of an executive with such a talent for tapping into the interests of audiences.
Last week, Mr. Darnell said that ''Multimillionaire'' was a hard lesson.
''This became much more than a television show,'' he said. ''That, I can do without. I'll take the ratings numbers. The rest of the experience, no.''
Photo: Unsafe at any speed? Michael H. Darnell in a 1998 staged photo for an article Spin magazine was doing on reality-based television. (Michael Lewis) Chart: ''Tabloid TV'' Michael H. Darnell's reality-based programs like When Good Pets Go Bad, left, have often had sizeable audiences. Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? Nov. 95: 11.7 million viewers Share: 14% Close Call: Cheating Death Nov. 96: 15 Share: 14 Breaking the Magician's Code Nov. 97: 24.2 Share: 22 When Good Pets Go Bad Nov. 98: 17.2 Share: 17 World's Worst Drivers May 99: 7.5 Share: 10 Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? Share: 16 (Sources: Fox; Nielsen Media Research
, but to say that this version of "For Once In My Life" was a trainwreck doesn't give trainwrecks proper justice. This was more like what would happen if a train derailed, flew off of a cliff and hit a passenger plane in midair, causing both to plummet into a volcano that erupted and took out three nuclear plants and caused a 7.3 earthquake all inside of two minutes' time. That might capture the same amount of people injured from hearing this song's wretchedness. Megan's cute blonde status only takes her so much (does anyone else see the Jay Leno chin yet???) and she still has the tone-deaf-but-can-text-for-any-blonde voting bloc on her side. Call me crazy but I don't think that this is a big enough group to save her from the Bottom 3. Only a bigger mess can keep her around for another week.
