At the Kansas City Star’s TV Barn blog, Aaron Barnhart examines MSNBC’s strategy of devoting as much as a third of their schedule to “documentary” programming. Barnhart takes issue with the channel’s use of the word “documentary” to encompass content as disparate as, on one hand, Witness to Jonestown (an original production of the newish MSNBC Films combining new interviews with ample footage from NBC’s archives) and Dear Zachary (which MSNBC Films acquired in partnership with Oscilloscope straight from the festival circuit); and on the other, the schlocky stuff that makes up the bulk of their “Doc Blocks,” like the Lockup series of Dateline-style exposes set inside various North American prisons, and the COPS knock-off Caught on Camera.
Amazingly, when Barnhart went to Michael Rubin, who programs all of this stuff for the network, and asked, “What’s the deal?” Rubin basically went on the defensive. Not only did he call Lockup specifically “a jewel,” but he insisted that MSNBC’s viewers make no distinctions between high-brow and low-blow non-fiction content. As he puts it:
“I work in a new world,” said Rubin, a veteran of network news going back to the “West 57″ show on CBS. “I look for everything my viewers are interested in. They’re as interested in the inside of a prison as much as they are interested in Dear Zachary or Supersize Me (the Morgan Spurlock film also acquired by MSNBC).
“They’re interested in going somewhere they can’t get to on their own, whether it’s inside a prison or the story of Dr. Bagby. No matter what film we do, the viewer is guaranteed to be an eyewitness. Our tastes span the full spectrum — and so does human interest.”
What I find interesting about this (and potentially dangerous) is that once the assumption is made that in the “new world,” COPS rip-offs are equivalent in the eyes of the audience to documentaries with loads of film festival acclaim –– ie: when what many of us consider “art” is invited to sit at the table with “trash” –– what’s to stop a “jewel” like Lockup from crossing over to the realm of art? And, of course, there’s the question we always, always come back to: what are we going to do about The Hills?!?
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth