Life after ‘Honey Boo Boo’: Inside Discovery’s fight to grow up
Now, as cord-cutters and online video plunge the cable business into chaos, Discovery is fighting aggressively to return to its roots, spending millions on glossy documentaries, science shows and “environmental advocacy campaigns” in a bet that smarter, more-distinctive programming will help it survive the new age of TV.
But that gamble has led to fresh worries and an identity crisis for Discovery Communications, the Silver Spring, Md.-based owner of Animal Planet, TLC and some of TV’s most lampooned franchises: Can viewers turned off by years of reality junk food ever take Discovery seriously again?
“One day we just came in and looked at each other and said, ‘You know, no more bearded guys in the kitchen with f---ing pigs running through the living room,’ ” Discovery head David Zaslav, the highest-paid chief executive in the United States, said one recent afternoon in his eighth-floor office in Manhattan. “Let’s get back to who we really are. We’re about satisfying curiosity. Let’s forget about the ratings right now and let’s chase what the brand is at its best.”
Discovery’s big bet highlights a key anxiety for America’s TV titans, who are increasingly losing the paying audience they counted on for decades to stay afloat. About 17 percent of U.S. households, or 21 million homes, have dropped (or never signed up for) cable, a cord-cutting wave that led investors this summer to stage a $50 billion sell-off of media stocks.
Discovery’s TLC brand — founded in the 1970s by the U.S. government as a free educational network, The Learning Channel — carved out its own profitable niche with syrupy “lifestyle” fare such as “
Sister Wives,” “My Big Fat Fabulous Life” and “
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” named for its Red Bull-chugging child “beauty queen.”
But that push toward tabloid-friendly TV also seemed to bleed into Discovery’s bedrock educational fare. The Discovery Channel was widely criticized in 2014 after airing “Eaten Alive,” in which a snake expert failed to get swallowed by an anaconda, and “Megalodon: The New Evidence,” which falsely suggested history’s largest “monster shark” was still alive.
To distinguish itself, Discovery has doubled down on its old-school core of natural history, animal conservation and adventure specials. The media giant tapped John Hoffman, an HBO veteran known for rigorous looks at American obesity and Alzheimer’s disease, to become its new boss of documentaries, with the mandate to ignore ratings and shoot for big talkers with award potential and strong reviews.
Hoffman’s first big move was picking up “
Racing Extinction,” an eco-vigilante tale from the creators of the Oscar-winning documentary “
The Cove” that mixes lushly shot explorations on the dangers of climate change with tense guerrilla stings inside the endangered-species black market.
The documentary, which will kick off a new wave of science specials planned for 2016, is exactly what Zaslav wants people to connect to Discovery — not the other stuff. When meeting a reporter in New York, he showed off a glowing Rolling Stone piece — “
How ‘Racing Extinction’ Could Save the World” — and grinned in the way one would expect a millionaire to grin after seeing his network’s showpiece anointed savior of the planet.
The risk, of course, is that Americans may not want nuanced conversations of topics such as animal conservation, whether they pay for cable or not.
That pressure to stay alive is real for Zaslav. Though
the company’s stock fell 24 percent in 2014, “Zas,” as his friends call him, was paid $156 million — more than the chiefs of CBS, Comcast and Disney combined. Much of that money will come in stock awards he will pocket over the next six years, giving him millions of reasons to keep the company in high gear.
Don’t expect Discovery’s back-to-basics pledge to see much airtime on gleefully lowbrow channels such as TLC. “
Long Island Medium,” whose host says she can commune with the dead, just launched its seventh season with a holiday special that the network said will include “readings focused solely on children.”
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...9eeaff906ef3_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop_b
