By Nancy deWolf Smith Breaking Greenville
TruTV Thursdays 10:30 p.m.
Greenville, Miss. is a small town of about 34,000 people
surrounded by cotton fields and other flora of the Mississippi
Delta. Among the fauna are the employees of two television stations
that supply the cast of TruTV's new reality series "Breaking
Greenville." They range from serious-minded African-Americans, some
of whom seem embarrassed to be part of the TruTV project, to a
perky blonde "anchor" from Connecticut whose goal in life is to
occupy the same pinnacle as talk-show host Kelly Rippa. Also
present are a couple of gentlemen with white hair and flashing
teeth, including a musical-theater buff named David Lush, who are
spending the twilight of their careers mentoring virtual
nitwits.
Think of various movies you've seen about big ambition at a
small TV station--"Up Close and Personal," for instance, and "To
Die For"--add the (sometimes unintended) parody subtext of a
mockumentary like "Best in Show," and that's the basic flavor
here.
Styled as a ratings duel between WABG (the ABC affiliate) and
WXVT ( CBS) the show confirms almost everything we already knew or
suspected about local TV stations. It is amusing. But never forget:
While "Greenville" invites us to laugh at the incompetence or
low-budget haplessness of the journos down in the Delta in one of
the country's dinkiest markets, the truth is that the big-city
stations and networks have gone just as far south in their way.
Even so, a reality show, with its camera crews and do-overs to
get stunts right, etc., would be difficult to pull off at a station
where real work was necessary for commercial-financial reasons.
This is not so true in Greenville.
WABG and WXVT do appear to be under the supervision of
experienced news directors and managers. At bottom, though, such
stations are nurseries for every journalism-school graduate who
ever had their saucer eyes trained on the bright lights of the TV
big-time.
What is less clear is whether some of them are as spectacularly
clueless as they appear to be. Take the Kelly Rippa wannabe, Lucy
Biggers, who is about a year and a half out of school and
introduced as WABG's morning-show anchor (not to be confused with
prime-time anchors, weather anchors et. al.) It's not her fault
that the most exciting interviews she gets are with a farmer and a
Goth-ish teenage singer-songwriter who've been filmed already by a
competing station. It may have been for the reality show only that
when the teleprompter conked out during a broadcast, Ms. Biggers
was seen crawling around with her backside in the air trying to
untangle a chord and get it to work again.
No one can say Ms. Biggers is not shrewd, or won't go far in her
chosen career. But how would you feel if you were her boss, and
asked for game-changing ideas of how to boost ratings and received
Ms. Biggers' suggestion: a live broadcast from a viewer's home.
This is supposed to whip the competition over at WXVT? The station
where another blonde, the zaftig and lucid Callie Carroll, has
thrown down the ratings-race gauntlet by weighing herself on
camera--and launched a get-healthy campaign that features her
dancing, her pillowy bosom certainly heaving, with a co-anchor
who's giving it his all but looks as if wishes he were never
born.
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