The Peacock In Shackles

By Paul Gray Sunday, July 23, 2000
    • Quality is the DNA of NBC," intoned the network's West Coast president, Scott Sassa, to TV critics in Pasadena, Calif., last week. The issue Sassa was obliquely addressing amounted to this: Why does NBC suddenly look so DOA?

    Here is CBS, reaping a summer-ratings bonanza with Survivor (and lesser returns with Big Brother). ABC, which doesn't need much help since it began airing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 24 hours a day last August, had a quasi-documentary series called Making the Band this spring. But NBC does not have a single example of that oxymoron "reality TV" on the air. Nothing to try out this summer. Nothing for the fall, either. The peacock network is momentarily without feathers--and so desperate that it seems ready to import Chains of Love, a "funny" bondage-and-dating show that was a flop when it was shown this spring on Dutch TV.

    If quality really mattered in network TV, of course, NBC would be garnering Nobel Prize nominations for refusing to sully its schedule with the likes of the hokey Survivor and the intelligence-challenged Millionaire and the relentlessly odious Big Brother. Instead, Sassa and NBC entertainment president Garth Ancier have been hearing ominous rumors that their bosses are unhappy that the entertainment division has failed to clamber aboard the careering reality express.

    How could NBC have missed this train? Didn't the runaway success of Millionaire alert everyone in the U.S. over the age of three that network TV was about to crash through yet another barrier of diminishing taste and expectations? Sassa explained this lapse of attention: "We were obsessed"--he might have said afflicted--"with having the highest quality shows and the highest quality audiences, and because of that we weren't as aggressive on [reality TV] as we could have been." In English: Frasier, Friends and Will & Grace were attracting the well-to-do young viewers advertisers cherish, and reality be damned.

    But now that Survivor has begun luring the very same demographics, considerably buffing CBS's stodgy profile in the process, Sassa and his colleagues have finally seen the light. "Reality programming is definitely here," he announced last week. "It isn't a fad; it's a trend."

    And what would NBC do about this fad, trend, tad, friend, whatever? Perhaps pick up Chains of Love from Endemol Entertainment, the company that originated Big Brother. How would the network's quality DNA react to Chains of Love? "It's a relationship show," Ancier said. The critics burst into laughter, and Ancier added, "That wasn't supposed to be funny."

    Maybe not, but "relationship show" is a curiously deadpan description of Chains of Love, which is based on this everyday real-life situation: a person of one sex is chained together, night and day, with people of the opposite sex. It could be a woman and five men, or vice versa. Happens all the time, especially in the red-light district of Amsterdam. The participants are allowed to unlink themselves for showers and calls of nature but otherwise must do everything, including venturing outside the apartment and sleeping, in tandem.

    Each day, the person at the center of this daisy chain, i.e., the lone woman or man, gets to banish one partner, which could also be seen as freeing that poor devil from a nightmare of proximity. Finally, only a man and a woman remain. Then, the original sole-sex participant gets to decide if he or she wants to spend more, presumably quality, time with the survivor. "If not," says Endemol spokesman Thomas Notermans, "they both go home."

    Chains of Love performed below expectations when it aired on Dutch station SBS 6. That may be in part because the episodes generated no carry-over suspense. The 50-min. segments were self-contained distillations of five days' worth of events; the chains were formed at the beginning, dissolved by the end. A Dutch viewer barely had time to make the participants' acquaintance before they were off the air and replaced by a new bunch. No Survivor-like celebrity awaited Chains of Love castoffs.

    Neither were the moral qualms voiced in some Dutch circles justified by what got on the air. The kinky connotations of chains and mixed-sex sleeping arrangements were overridden by what Notermans calls "funny situations," such as five people chained together ankles-to-wrists trying to get into a taxi.

    Does this seem the sort of fare that will rivet U.S. viewers? Will NBC really decide to put this on the air? That isn't meant to be funny.