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October 19, 2003
TOUCH-SCREEN VIEWING: As the election season gets under way, politics is popping up in prime time
BY GLENN GARVIN
The Miami Herald
If California's recent gubernatorial recall election struck you as alarmingly like an episode of American Idol, brace yourself: A Hollywood producer is pitching a show called American Candidate on which 100 contestants vie to become a ''people's candidate'' for president next year.
''It's a good concept, a very good concept for a show,'' says Pete Liguori, president of Rupert Murdoch's FX cable network, which seriously considered American Candidate before bowing out. ``The only reason we turned it down was money -- it proved to be a pretty costly project once we went over the numbers.''
Expense aside, several broadcast executives say they expect American Candidate to land somewhere on television next year. The show's producer, R.J. Cutler, says it's inevitable: ``Politics and television live at the same intersection. There's no news in that.''
The idea of choosing an American president on a game show might seem like a scene trimmed from the bitter TV satire Network. But as the 2004 presidential campaign approaches, it's getting harder to tell television fantasy from political fact:
• TV sets click on all over Washington, D.C., Sunday nights as the starstruck city tunes in to watch itself on HBO's K Street, an insider drama about sleazy lobbyists in which saber-toothed spinmasters James Carville and Mary Matalin play themselves. ''Holy [bleep], are people watching the thing!'' exclaims CNN Crossfire combatant Tucker Carlson, a confirmed addict.
• NBC's White House policy-opera The West Wing, widely believed to be headed for a Nielsen-ratings recall last season, just won its fourth straight best-drama Emmy -- and its ratings are stronger than ever.
• A malaprop-spouting President Bush has been a character on episodes of two different sitcoms, NBC's Whoopi and ABC's The George Lopez Show, this fall, touching off heated -- and hilarious -- arguments among the characters on both shows. ''Any time you do that sort of humor, it's a bit risky,'' concedes Whoopi producer Larry Wilmore. ``But why not be a little daring? Who knows, you might get slapped on the nose -- or people might love it.''
Nowhere was the flicker between image and reality more confusing than the California recall election, fought out on late-night talk shows right to the bitter end, when the defeated Gray Davis used David Letterman's show to offer a Top 10 list of sarcastic suggestions to victor Arnold Schwarzenegger. (``No. 8: ``Listen to your constituents -- except Michael Jackson.'')
The recall election didn't just seem like a TV show -- it was a TV show: The Game Show Network's Who Wants to Be Governor of California? in which five dozen of the real candidates competed for viewer votes to win a $21,000 campaign contribution. Winner: Porn actress Mary Carey, who promised to tax breast implants.
The idea that his program, however whimsical, might be helping to turn U.S. elections into American Idol doesn't concern Game Show Network president Rich Cronin: ``Watch these debates between the Democratic presidential candidates. Afterward, the pundits talk about who won, who lost, who said something stupid, who showed talent. It's really very much like American Idol.''
Dismissive, too, is Cutler, the veteran documentary-maker (his series on Texas college students, Freshman Diaries, is currently appearing on Showtime) behind American Candidate. Concerns about the malign influence of television on politics, he says, should be focused in a different direction.
''You have these very powerful cable news networks. If one or more of those news channels have a political agenda, is that a good thing? Is that a dangerous thing?'' he argues. ``I worry far less about the subject of politics as entertainment.''
LONG HISTORY
Entertainment TV's interest in politics is nothing new -- the networks have been staging dramas and sitcoms in Washington and other political settings for more than four decades. The results have ranged from the ludicrous (NBC's 1978 Grandpa Goes To Washington) to the downright bizarre (UPN's 1998 The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, in which a black butler counseled a sex-crazed Abraham Lincoln).
''There's this two-way thing between Hollywood and Washington, because both of them know that what they do is a show,'' says Diana McLellan, a veteran Washington gossip columnist and author of The Girls, a history of lesbian society in Hollywood. ``Each of them has this little knot of respect for the other. It is truly pathetic.''
Until The West Wing, the mutual infatuation had never produced successful offspring; TV shows set in Washington have been shunned by both viewers and critics. Most have followed the same pattern, derived from the 1939 James Stewart film Mr. Smith Goes To Washington: A truthful common man goes to Washington and fights the deceitful special interests.
Even The West Wing's crusading liberal president Josiah Bartlett is a linear descendant of Mr. Smith. ''Even taken in the most modest doses, you're likely to get diabetes from The West Wing,'' says Ben Stein, an actor and screenwriter who was also a speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford. ``It's the fluff candy of drama . . . I love [West Wing star] Martin Sheen -- he's my neighbor in Malibu, a fine guy -- but you need massive doses of insulin to watch his show.''
The West Wing's superior writing and acting has overcome its formulaic approach. But many Hollywood producers and writers with a Washington background say that TV has to lay Mr. Smith to rest if political dramas are to succeed.
''I think there has been an attitude on Hollywood's part, in dealing with Washington and politics, that people wanted to see their politicians -- or their government -- in a certain reverential way,'' says Stuart Stevens, a Republican political consultant and co-producer of K Street.
``I don't agree with that. I don't get that. History tells us that people are interested in big powerful forces in their lives: police, law, medicine. At first, the shows are reverential: Dr. Kildare. Then you get St. Elsewhere. Or Perry Mason and, later, L.A. Law . . . Eventually, people get ready to see how things are instead of how they'd like things to be.''
DIVIDED OPINIONS
If he's right, K Street is the St. Elsewhere to The West Wing's Dr. Kildare. There are no upstanding citizen-politicians on K Street -- just a bunch of grubby lobbyists playing out Machiavellian fantasies on one another. The only real ideology in the show is money.
Its cinéma vérité style is bolstered by the use of real-life Washington figures -- from senators like Orrin Hatch and Barbara Boxer to think-tank mavens like Kenneth Adelman -- playing themselves, using mostly unscripted dialogue. The resulting collision of styles and cultures has produced some real Kodak moments.
In a scene where political consultant Paul Begala was supposed to be helping Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean prepare for a debate, Begala warned him not to make personal attacks on one of the other candidates, ''or he'll [bleep] you like a tied dog.'' Gasped a shocked Dean: ``Paul, I don't think you can say that on HBO.''
Slow-moving and sometimes indecipherable in its inside-baseball approach to politics, K Street is the lowest-rated drama in years on HBO's powerhouse Sunday-night lineup. But in official Washington, it's the most important show since that infamous night at the Ford Theater.
The Washington Post runs a regular George Clooney sighting feature reporting the whereabouts of K Street's executive producer, and the high-octane political newsletter The Hotline has Your K Street Summary listing the latest power players to land cameos appearances on the show. Even journalists like Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz and Time columnist Joe Klein have gone panting after roles.
The show's conquest of Capitol Hill appalls some. ''We in Washington are very self-important people, and the people you see in K Street are particularly self-important,'' jeers Kim Hume, the Washington bureau chief of Fox News. ``It's a little cabal of Washington insiders who live for this stuff. From my perspective, it's a ridiculous way to spend your time.''
Others, though, say it's just an understandable fascination with seeing your friends on television. ''I was watching the other night, and a guy I go duck-hunting with was standing behind James and Mary at a restaurant,'' says CNN's Carlson. ``Four people I know were in another scene. . . . It's like looking at your high school yearbook.''
Carlson, who trades jibes with Carville for half an hour every afternoon on CNN's Crossfire, certainly feels no yearning to see himself on TV for an extra 90 seconds. But he remains spellbound by K Street's astonishing detail. For example, he was stunned to hear a lobbyist say in passing that he was going to ask Gary Maloney to investigate someone.
''Gary Maloney is a real person,'' Carlson says. ``He's famous to about nine political reporters as one of the most hardball Republican researchers. Even among political junkies, not one in a thousand have heard of him . . . I'm just amazed at the degree to which they understand the city. It's not all Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle.''
Even Carlson, however, admits that the blend of reality and fiction in K Street can be disconcerting. He was watching the show with his wife when their pal, lobbyist John Breaux, turned up in one episode playing himself. When the on-screen Breaux began flirting with a woman in a bar, Carlson's wife -- a close friend of Breaux's real-life girlfriend -- shouted: ``What's John doing hitting on that girl? What's wrong with him?''
''I told her, honey, it's only a TV show,'' Carlson says. ``But I'm not sure she's over it.''
Posted by Jo at October 19, 2003 09:22 AM