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The tearful interviews, the wedding footage and--that sine qua non money shot--the baby pictures: it can be hard for the uninitiated to tell the shows apart. But there are identifiable categories. Educational, middlebrow offerings like Biography and PBS's American Masters aim to be definitive (and, more rarely, hard-hitting), while entertainment channels tend toward frothy love letters like CMT Showcase. Others are hybrids, like Bravo's brainy Bravo Profiles, which delves into artists' creative processes--it's fan mail, but in iambic pentameter. Likewise, Intimate Portrait has a classy roster of "women of substance," which it treats with extreme deference and the Lilith Fair aesthetics of a SnackWell's commercial. "We don't claim to be journalism," says Dawn Tarnofsky-Ostroff, Lifetime's executive vice president of entertainment. "We have a very specific point of view, in the subject's own words."
Last and hardly least, the But-the-Good-Times-Were-Not-Meant- to-Last genre relies on stars' generous willingness to drink, go bankrupt and have their houses burned down in order to create hypnotic TV. Behind the Music delivers on the credits' promise of "Fame...Passion... Heartbreak...Success...Glory" with an Aristotelian three-act structure--rise, fall and rehab--and florid narration: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers "came out of the South--driven by jangling guitars and led by a rock-'n'-roll rebel!" E!'s True Hollywood Story is tart and eager to dish dirt. Compare an Intimate Portrait on Natalie Wood, filled with warm family reminiscences, with E!'s dark narrative of despair and drugs that pulled the series' second-highest rating. "Some of our stories end happily, some don't," says E! vice president of original programming Betsy Rott. "We're not afraid to tell the complete story." And Fame, Passion, Heartbreak, and so on have their rewards: Story began running nightly this month; BTM, which has improved its Sunday-night time slot's ratings 221% since 1997, went to twice a night in May.
Bio programming pays off in more than ratings. In a nutshell: life is cheap. For cable channels, which lack the deep pockets of their broadcast counterparts, bios are TV Helper. Jason Goodman, a former producer for BTM, says an episode costs around $150,000; a biographical movie can cost a few million dollars. The cooperation of the subject can defray costs, not only by allowing extensive interviews but also by providing free, all-important photos. Many biography shows will proceed only with the subject's approval. E! and A&E, which do some shows without cooperation--"It's Biography, not Autobiography," A&E's Cascio likes to say--contend that gives them independence; others say cooperation only improves the final product. But in a BTM on Madonna, says the episode's producer, Goodman, "cooperation" meant the star got approval over interviewees. Executive producer Gay Rosenthal responds, "On rare occasions there has been editorial input, but if I felt it compromised the show, I wouldn't do it."