What Do Guys Want?

By James Poniewozik Monday, May 24, 2004
    • ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY TAVIS COBURN

    At last week's TV upfronts — the annual galas at which the broadcast networks preview next season's series for advertisers — CBS offered a lesson in the difference between life and TV. It closed its presentation with a surprise appearance by the Who, playing its classic Who Are You, the theme of CSI. Carnegie Hall shook, Pete Townshend windmilled on his guitar, and Roger Daltrey howled, "Oooooh, who the f___ are you?"

    If CBS had been airing the show, it would have had to bleep the F word — and it knows better than anyone else what you can't get away with on TV today, having been on the receiving end of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl Sunday "wardrobe malfunction." But an aggressive FCC was only one of network TV's problems last season. Another was the sudden, steep drop-off in young male viewers, the most elusive and therefore coveted audience for advertisers. As of April, according to Nielsen Media Research, prime-time broadcast ratings among men ages 18 to 34 were down more than 13% from the previous season.


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    TV's biggest quandary is how to solve one problem without worsening the other. The television networks — and their counterparts in radio — are under government scrutiny, after all, because of young men. They were the reason MTV produced the racy halftime show. They were the reason for the gross-out Super Bowl commercials that also got criticized. And other decency targets — The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, Fear Factor, Howard Stern? Young men, young men, young men.

    What do guys want that they can't get from the networks? Sex, sure, but, more than that, danger and authenticity — the raw, unbleeped real deal, unpredictable and without a five-second delay. Now they get that from cable (up 1.5% during prime time) and video games (up 17.6%), which have no federal chaperones. Lose the guys, and you lose millions in ad revenue. Alienate the FCC, especially in an election year, and you risk millions in fines. The networks are caught between an irresistible force and an implacable object.

    "It's very frustrating," says Jordan Levin, CEO of the WB. "Free TV is in the public interest, and yet laws are facilitating audience growth for cable." But regulation is the networks' trade-off for free access to broadcast spectrums worth billions of dollars. So the new network schedules seek to lure guys within those constraints. There are cop shows and action shows, series set in casinos and boxing rings. Fox is relying on male-oriented sitcoms like Method & Red, with hip-hop stars Method Man and Redman. NBC unveiled Summer Olympics promos that made swimming and gymnastics look like X Games events, and its midseason sitcom The Men's Room examines male issues and anxieties from what its president of entertainment, Kevin Reilly, says will be a sophisticated perspective. "This is not a show about burping and farting," he says.

    But don't worry, guys. You can find that elsewhere! At the WB, Levin announced a block of "male comedy" sketch shows from Jeff Foxworthy and Drew Carey. On Foxworthy's Blue Collar TV, a comic marvels at women's ability to withstand hours of labor: "I give up on a poop after 20 minutes," he says. And ABC picked up Savages, a sitcom about a widower and his sons living blissfully in a pigsty. As the beer commercials tell us, the quickest way to men's hearts is through insulting stereotypes.

    Perhaps the best example of the tension between commerce and decency was a new ABC drama titled Doing It. Based on a British novel, it aims to be My So-Called Life for teenage guys, who, of course, think about sex roughly once a breath. Executive producer Stu Bloomberg describes the show as "life through the prism of hormones." ABC bought the series but out of post-Janet anxiousness changed the title to Life As We Know It — which may deter the decency cops but also sounds like something that would run on Lifetime.

    At CBS, which, despite Janet and Survivor, has one of TV's older audiences, president Leslie Moonves pooh-poohed advertisers' youth fixation. "Are you looking for the people who actually buy cars," he asked, "or the people who say, 'Daddy, please buy me a car'?" Nice line, but CBS has scheduled Clubhouse, a drama about a 16year-old bat boy for a fictional New York baseball team, which Moonves told the admen would "make us much younger" on Tuesday nights. A show like Clubhouse, however, raises the question of what exactly male-friendly programming means. Last fall some executives blamed the XY flight on too many new shows with female leads (Karen Sisco, Miss Match). But casting men doesn't automatically mean attracting men. Clubhouse is a mostly male sports story, but it's also a coming-of-age tale that looks several notches too sentimental for the Punk'd generation. Likewise with NBC's action-and-bikini-heavy cop show Hawaii. Guys these days are used to video games in which they can orchestrate their own car chases, crashes and shoot-outs, with the violence — and even sex — rendered with cinematic accuracy. To them, even a slick action show in its safe-for-network version may seem as dated as Tom Selleck's Magnum, P.I. mustache.

    So what's a network to do? One is following the classic dating advice: Act like you're not interested. A few years ago, UPN focused almost entirely on such boy bait as WWE Smackdown! and Star Trek: Enterprise. But last year the Tyra Banks reality series America's Next Top Model became UPN's biggest hit — and, despite its scantily clad, size-0 catwalkers, its audience is as girly as a little black dress. UPN now says it will complement Model with young-female-friendly romantic comedies and dramas like Kevin Hill, starring the hunkalicious Taye Diggs.

    Then there is that old school of thought that network TV is a feminine medium: women make most viewing decisions, so it's best to create shows that women will seek out and men will tolerate. NBC's Reilly points to its Friends spin-off, Joey, centered on a character who's adorable to women and likable to guys. (Just in case, the network cast shapely Drea de Matteo as Joey's sister.) What, after all, do most men want? To be in the good graces of a woman. She's the one who has the remote.