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Life is also like a box of chocolates--and no lousy nine-piece assortment either. The modern star machine and the graveyard of history offer a huge store of subjects, even if a series creates episodes at a 50- or 100-a-year clip. Still, shows are beginning to repeat one another's material. David Wolper, who produced the classic Biography (the forebear of A&E's) with Mike Wallace in the 1960s, enjoys many of the new shows but jokes, "One of these days, my dentist is going to be on there."
But what are these shows teaching us, besides Cher's marital record? In part, they may be encouraging us to focus more than we already do on personalities: to understand the world by examining not processes or social forces but the actions of famous individuals. Many bio shows, of course, make no bones about being plain entertainment, but even higher-minded ones are about celebrity: political celebrities, historical celebrities, religious celebrities (Biography has profiled Jesus and Satan). The camera and the picture tube have affected the way we view history: as a carousel of well-known faces. And lately, those faces are as likely to be entertainers as world leaders. To the average American, was the '50s the age of Ike or of Elvis?
Indeed, part of the fascination of the fluffier shows is precisely that they treat the pop culture by which we keep our internal calendars as real history. Sure, it's funny to hear E! trumpet "the meteoric rise and turbulent run of Three's Company," as if it were the Manchu dynasty, but then again, Jack, Janet and Chrissy offer a pretty sharp picture of post-sexual revolution America. In fact, the bio shows are often at their best--and most successful, ratings-wise--when chronicling TV itself: Ozzie and Harriet on A&E, journalist Jessica Savitch on Lifetime. Even veteran producer Wolper says a TV bio is no substitute for a book: "You forget half of it by the next day." In the end, bio shows may be better at presenting the little picture, showing us how other people--people with bigger cars and more cosmetic surgery than the rest of us--contend with life. Their popularity, says MTV executive vice president Brian Graden, "may be a reaction to a world in which people are moving too fast and with too much input." (Graden, note, works for MTV.)
Educational or not, the success of biography shows seems to have inspired a retro entertainment trend: bio movies. VH1 has begun a series of "true rock story" movies--the second, on Ricky Nelson, debuts Aug. 22--and A&E will air the four-hour bioflick P.T. Barnum, starring Beau Bridges, in September. The thirst for bio TV could finally subside, but thus far audiences have proved, as A&E's protagonist might say, that there's a, um, viewer born every minute. And a corresponding need for stories. You might just want to hang on to your baby pictures.
--With reporting by Harriet Barovick/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles