Television: The Peacock In Shackles

Quality is the DNA of NBC," intoned the network's West Coast president, Scott Sassa, to TV critics in Pasadena, Calif., last week. The issue Sassa was obliquely addressing amounted to this: Why does NBC suddenly look so DOA?

Here is CBS, reaping a summer-ratings bonanza with Survivor (and lesser returns with Big Brother). ABC, which doesn't need much help since it began airing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 24 hours a day last August, had a quasi-documentary series called Making the Band this spring. But NBC does not have a single example of that oxymoron "reality TV" on the air. Nothing to try out this summer. Nothing for the fall, either. The peacock network is momentarily without feathers--and so desperate that it seems ready to import Chains of Love, a "funny" bondage-and-dating show that was a flop when it was shown this spring on Dutch TV.

If quality really mattered in network TV, of course, NBC would be garnering Nobel Prize nominations for refusing to sully its schedule with the likes of the hokey Survivor and the intelligence-challenged Millionaire and the relentlessly odious Big Brother. Instead, Sassa and NBC entertainment president Garth Ancier have been hearing ominous rumors that their bosses are unhappy that the entertainment division has failed to clamber aboard the careering reality express.

How could NBC have missed this train? Didn't the runaway success of Millionaire alert everyone in the U.S. over the age of three that network TV was about to crash through yet another barrier of diminishing taste and expectations? Sassa explained this lapse of attention: "We were obsessed"--he might have said afflicted--"with having the highest quality shows and the highest quality audiences, and because of that we weren't as aggressive on [reality TV] as we could have been." In English: Frasier, Friends and Will & Grace were attracting the well-to-do young viewers advertisers cherish, and reality be damned.

But now that Survivor has begun luring the very same demographics, considerably buffing CBS's stodgy profile in the process, Sassa and his colleagues have finally seen the light. "Reality programming is definitely here," he announced last week. "It isn't a fad; it's a trend."

And what would NBC do about this fad, trend, tad, friend, whatever? Perhaps pick up Chains of Love from Endemol Entertainment, the company that originated Big Brother. How would the network's quality DNA react to Chains of Love? "It's a relationship show," Ancier said. The critics burst into laughter, and Ancier added, "That wasn't supposed to be funny."

Maybe not, but "relationship show" is a curiously deadpan description of Chains of Love, which is based on this everyday real-life situation: a person of one sex is chained together, night and day, with people of the opposite sex. It could be a woman and five men, or vice versa. Happens all the time, especially in the red-light district of Amsterdam. The participants are allowed to unlink themselves for showers and calls of nature but otherwise must do everything, including venturing outside the apartment and sleeping, in tandem.