In Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, Lucille Ball, Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong and 26 others whirl around and around in an unending cycle. The spectacle is an art exhibition--"The Turn of the Century," a carousel adorned with 20th century pop and historical images--but you could be excused for mistaking it for a typical day's television programming. With more than a dozen biography programs feeding the audience's seemingly bottomless lust for lives, cable has likewise become a vast merry-go-round where the life stories of Roosevelts and Roseannes pop up constantly and with equal prominence.
"The Turn of the Century" is sponsored by the cable network A&E, which is only appropriate considering that the channel helped spawn TV's biomania with its 12-year-old Biography. This franchise draws A&E's highest prime-time ratings and has spun off CDs, videos, a digital all-bio channel and a magazine whose readership A&E places at more than 2 million. The program's thesis is simple: people are more interested in history that has a famous face on it. "We live in an age of celebrity," says Michael Cascio, A&E's senior vice president for programming. "That's how people define an era; that's how they define their own life, by the people in it."
Biography, nominated for three Emmys this year, has produced some 700 shows informed by an old-fashioned catholic approach. It assumes one united audience that will appreciate Ivan the Terrible as well as Andre the Giant. The newer trend, however, is the bio-niche. We have TNN's The Life and Times of... and CMT's CMT Showcase (country music, though Life has branched out); MTV's Biorhythm and VH1's triple threat, Where Are They Now?, Before They Were Rock Stars and the flagship Behind the Music (pop music); Lifetime's Intimate Portrait (women); CNN's Pinnacle and Movers (business); and Fox Family Channel's Famous Families (guess). C-SPAN's American Presidents profiles the 41 Chief Executives in order--though it won't, alas, cover Grover Cleveland in two nonconsecutive broadcasts.
Who's next?, you're thinking. Comedy Central? Actually, this month the network launched A Comic Life with a Steve Martin bio narrated by director Ivan
Reitman, whose decidedly unfunny unctuousness ("You make audiences laugh all day, all over the world...") made one long for the days when comics would salute their peers by getting drunk and insulting them.
Saturation? Not in the eyes of viewers--many of the programs pull down their network's highest ratings--or of the new competitors and big names jumping on the bandwagon. This fall VH1 adds The Road to Fame, on rising bands; CNBC is preparing the as yet unscheduled In Profile with Bob Costas, on sports, entertainment and (especially) business luminaries; and MSNBC launches Headliners & Legends with Matt Lauer (one hour every weeknight) on Sept. 27. "I can't honestly say there will be huge differences" between Headliners and existing shows, concedes executive producer Tim Uehlinger. "It's taking what Biography does so well and Behind the Music does so well another step forward." But he hopes to use NBC's video archives to turn around episodes quickly in response to news events, in addition to a regular lineup of more time-consuming, in-depth newsmaker and entertainer profiles.