Here’s some more items on American cable buyers’ shopping list. Of course, items wanted can change so make sure you look in the latest trades to see what they might have added to their development slate.
MTV
Well, we all know that Jersey Shore is the biggest hit on MTV with ratings averaging 8.8. That isn’t surprising given that their audience is 16-year-old girls. Their main slot of programming is at 10 .p.m. but they are doing strong numbers at 11 or 11:30. Men like their Sunday night programming block.
They’ve just finished a show called cuffed about kids and cops where the kids are in a confessional in the back of the police car. They make sure that all of their productions aren’t earnest.
They really like the underdog stories where the characters are large. Taboos, like religion, really work for them as well as Middle America stories. They don’t want LA or NY stories and no Americans touring foreign countries for them. They don’t do pilots, preferring to see 15-20 minute presentations with the real arc of the story.
Right now they are looking for a love line type show – the next in the generation of sex shows.
Style
This cable network is in 66 million homes and they do 200 original programming hours with a third of them being done in-house. Their viewer is a 38-year-old woman who is concerned with fashion and beauty – not runway models, but more a transformational focus. How can I look good like that?
Right now their big shows are Jerseylicious, and Ruby, a 700-pound woman who came to them with a show idea about herself. Every woman can relate to it. They’ve followed that show up with a show 2 Fat for 15 that focuses on kids between 11-18 who are at a fat camp.
They want shows to be 60 minutes. That way people to tune in longer.
Bravo
They have four pillars of programming – competition/reality; docu-soaps, formats and potpourri. The audience is 65% female, 35% male.
With their competition shows, they need a big host like a Heidi Klum for Project Runway. That show has been their template since it hit the airwaves in 2004.
Docu-soaps about rich people or people who work for them really do well in the ratings, like the Housewives series. Or shows like Million Dollar Listing and Flipping Out hit all the marks for Bravo. They don’t commission pilots. They just look for sizzle in the characters on the reel.
They look for recurring characters in their formats – like Millionaire Matchmaker so that viewers can come in an out of a series without having to see the initial episodes.
Bravo’s potpourri category includes game shows and one called Approval where 4 people discuss the week in pop culture.
