If you’ve been watching ABC lately, you’ve probably seen the ads.
ABC is way pushing The Benefactor which is the reality show I worked on from about February until July this year. If you’re new to the site, most of my May posts were from Dallas where I was on location producing the show. It was a great experience and the show turned out excellently.
Of course, what is filmed and what you see as a bystander eventually could be messed up by the network. Now that I’ve been off the show for a month or so I get the feeling that the new head of ABC entertainment has decided to tweak the direction of the show so that it can be direct competition with The Apprentice. I could be wrong, but I am getting my strange Nostradamus feelings that the shows are being recut to give the audience what the media thinks they want — Mark Cuban as mentor to someone just like him versus Mark Cuban wanting to watch the contestants shine as themselves and be worthy of winning the prize.
Again, I have no specific intel that points me in this direction except for watching the recent ads and seeing how the terminology has changed. The show went from “It’s the game of life” to their latest set of rhyming voice over… “It’s the money factor. The character factor. The Benefactor.”
God, sometimes you wish advertising people had a little more creativity.
Nonetheless, I am way excited about the show’s premiere on Monday, September 13th at 8:00pm. No matter what the mandates from the network are, the results and outcomes of the characters cannot be changed. It is, at its heart, a game show for money — and standards and practices are very specific and very strict about how things are done. So, based on that I can tell you that you’re in for a treat — give it a chance and you’ll be rewarded if you go the distance with this one.
On a totally unrelated note (but sort of related), I set my TiVo to record The Amazing Race last Saturday night (the re-airing of the previous week’s episode which I missed) and low and behold only got 15 minutes of the show because it was delayed by a baseball game. I fear, and hope it won’t be the case, when The Benefactor airs after Monday Night Football on the West Coast. If those games are delayed and I’m not home to babysit the TiVo, I could get screwed yet again with a less than full show.
I am working through the mechanics of this problem and hope to have a solution to you ASAP.
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