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TBS's very hot 'Ripley's'
Freak show scores big on a most unlikely network
By Elizabeth White
You don't have to know much about television to just know that when you're watching a segment about a man without a face, you are watching the Fox network.
The show might be titled "World's Most Botched Operations: Scalpel Screw-ups Beyond Your Worst Nightmares."
You are not watching Fox. You are watching the new--shall we say improved?--TBS.
The show is "Ripley’s Believe It or Not," a televised revival of a series that ran in Sunday comics for decades, featuring the weirdest of the very weird and saddest blunders of Mother Nature.
The hour-long show consists of brief segments on bizarre topics, all pieced together with commentary by the host, ex-Superman Dean Cain.
The subject matter is classic circus-sideshow, ranging from modern-day cannibals, to medicinal uses of maggots, to our man without a face. Cain generally mugs for the audience, making shocked or disgusted faces at the end of each segment.
Oddly, perhaps weirdly, the show is proving a quiet success for TBS, routinely landing in the top-50 basic cable programs for the week in households and the top-10 programs among adults 18-49. That puts it well ahead of other, more-highly-touted original cable series on Lifetime and A&E.
"We’ve always been fascinated by what is odd," says Bill Cox, senior vice president of programming for TBS Superstation.
"And what works with ‘Ripley’s’ is that once you see it you can’t wait to talk to somebody about it. Sometimes people can’t look at the screen, but they do."
Indeed they do.
"Ripley’s" averages 3.2 million viewers during its 8 p.m. Wednesday night airing.
That's nearly one million more viewers than TBS generally averages during primetime for the week. Among adults 18-49, "Ripley’s" usually draws about 1.6 million viewers.
Last week, "Ripley’s" pulled in 1.8 million adults 18-49 and finished eighth for the week.
But perhaps more odd than the show's success is that it is appearing on TBS.
By tradition, TBS has been what you might call Southern TV at its best, built somewhat in the image of and according to the tastes of founder Ted Turner, featuring repeats of popular movies, sitcoms, and Atlanta Braves games.
If less than daring, such programming has been highly successful, pushing the cable network to rank among the five most popular networks in both households and adults 18-49.
So why change? Why venture into original programming? And why 'Ripley's?'
The answer is a jumble of a lot of factors, many of them rooted in the corporate world of mergers and the new synergies that are emerging from them.
Note that TBS is now part of the new world of AOL Time Warner and that one of its chief competitors, TNN, has also shaken off its Southern roots, changing its name from The Nashville Network to The National Network. TNN is a leading property of Viacom, parent of CBS. Both Viacom and AOL Time Warner are busy constructing webs to allow effective cross-selling of their many holdings.
Odd as it may seem, "Ripley's" is a good fit for TBS's new agenda, and as Cox explains, it is so on several counts. It is a first step in original programming, and it aims for the young male demographic the network wants to build on.
It's also low-risk. "We wanted to look at reality-based programming because it’s less of a risk. It’s cheaper and there’s always a certain amount of appetite for it," says Cox. "We’d rather stick our toe in with it than dramatic series or sitcoms."
Now the network is looking for a companion show to "Ripley’s," in addition to possibly expanding next week’s reality special "Wargames" into a regular series. For scripted series, the network is considering turning the upcoming made-for-TV movie "Invincible" into a regular martial-arts action show.
At the same time, TBS has recently announced that it is dropping its WCW wrestling programs, suggesting that TBS is trying to position itself as a guy’s network somewhere between the more upscale TNT and the wrestling heavy TNN.
"Dropping wrestling is a sign that TBS is moving in a new direction," says Mark Geller, vice president and group media director at GSD&M. "They’re a bigger network and a stronger player [than TNN], and they want to go in a more high quality direction."
"TBS has been a healthy, solid network, but it doesn’t hurt to be a little more contemporary," says Geller. "It makes it more marketable as a whole entity, like Viacom."
Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director at Horizon Media, also makes the Viacom comparison. "They have to keep up with what the Viacoms, Fox News and Disneys are doing, particularly Viacom," says Adgate. "AOL-Time Warner hasn’t done much of that yet."
Cox says that shows like "Ripley’s," along with more modern sitcoms like "Friends" and "Seinfeld," will help distinguish TBS from its sister network, TNT, as TBS shifts from its base of movies to more original programming.
"We rely more on half-hour sitcoms. We think we can distinguish ourselves in that way. TNT’s ‘Bull’ is a great show, but not the kind of show we would have," says Cox. "We want to go for the guy who’s looking for entertainment but not necessarily to be educated."
"The feature films eventually will be found on other networks. You don’t identify your brand with movies," says Cox.
-Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.
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