Their challenge: inventing a daily Over Easy for new aging generations
This proposed daily magazine-format show has a vast potential audience that already regards PBS as a favorite channel. But will it have the host and the style to address topics of interest to older Americans without turning them off?
Public TV stations, eager for younger viewers, will be a hard sell, says Ben Bayol, an executive producer with the Evergreen Project in San Francisco. A lot will depend on the pilot, for which the project is now raising funds. To get series production money and carriage, the pilot will have to defy preconceptions of a program that appeals to people of a certain age group.
The project, founded and shepherded by Harley Christensen and now allied
with Peter Calabrese’s company, Q Media Partners, aims to launch the
as-yet-unnamed series as soon as fall 2004, producing 130 half-hours a year
and airing each twice. KTEH in San Jose will be the presenting station.
Christensen, head of the Seniors Media Lab, expects the show will impart information
through a magazine format “with a how-to flavor.” Americans are
unschooled about health problems and other things they need to know as they
grow older, he says.
Though the show has a huge target audience, the producers know it cannot depress them with blatant reminders of mortality or offend them by pandering. “We don’t need someone preaching to us,” Christensen says.
“The shingle we hang out there is not going to be, ‘If you’re old and tired, watch us,’” says Bayol. Any generation that includes Mick Jagger has not yet retired to passivity. The trick, he says, is similar to the one Sesame Street’s producers pulled off more than 30 years ago—entertaining viewers while educating them. The result has to be “a great, gotta-watch television show” on the surface, while it’s “totally mission-driven” underneath, he says.
“We want numbers—lower blood pressure, lower standing pulse rate,
lower prescription drugs for anxiety,” says Bayol.
The show needs to have the life-changing power of a show like Oprah, Bayol
says. To pubcasters who point to Lawrence Welk reruns as their offering for
grayheads, he replies: “Lawrence Welk does not a life change make.”
“It’s shortsighted for stations to try to avoid one of the greatest
demographic assets they’ve got,” says Bayol.
That audience will prove appealing to underwriters, Christensen predicts.
He expects to go after money management companies and manufacturers of luxury
cars and pharmaceuticals.
The obvious underwriter, as well a good content source, would be AARP, but
Christensen and others say the huge seniors’ association insists on
editorial control, which public TV could not relinquish. Christensen says
he learned that when he was developing a project for PBS in the 1990s.
Between 1977 and 1981, PBS had an informational show for seniors that did
the job, says Bayol. He worked on Over Easy as writer and then producer for
most of its six years in production at San Francisco’s KQED.
“Over Easy had a phenomenal relationship with its audience,” Bayol remembers. “We had scores of people who dealt with the show’s mail.” Though it was aimed at older viewers, “there was nothing ghettoish about it,” he says. “We had a band, we had an audience, we had all the trimmings.” Former Today anchor Hugh Downs was the original host (before he moved to ABC’s 20/20), followed by Broadway legend Mary Martin and newsman Jim Hartz.
Posted Nov. 12, 2003
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