Bio Sphere

By James Poniewozik

In Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, Lucille Ball, Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong and 26 others whirl around and around in an unending cycle. The spectacle is an art exhibition--"The Turn of the Century," a carousel adorned with 20th century pop and historical images--but you could be excused for mistaking it for a typical day's television programming. With more than a dozen biography programs feeding the audience's seemingly bottomless lust for lives, cable has likewise become a vast merry-go-round where the life stories of Roosevelts and Roseannes pop up constantly and with equal prominence.

"The Turn of the Century" is sponsored by the cable network A&E, which is only appropriate considering that the channel helped spawn TV's biomania with its 12-year-old Biography. This franchise draws A&E's highest prime-time ratings and has spun off CDs, videos, a digital all-bio channel and a magazine whose readership A&E places at more than 2 million. The program's thesis is simple: people are more interested in history that has a famous face on it. "We live in an age of celebrity," says Michael Cascio, A&E's senior vice president for programming. "That's how people define an era; that's how they define their own life, by the people in it."

Biography, nominated for three Emmys this year, has produced some 700 shows informed by an old-fashioned catholic approach. It assumes one united audience that will appreciate Ivan the Terrible as well as Andre the Giant. The newer trend, however, is the bio-niche. We have TNN's The Life and Times of... and CMT's CMT Showcase (country music, though Life has branched out); MTV's Biorhythm and VH1's triple threat, Where Are They Now?, Before They Were Rock Stars and the flagship Behind the Music (pop music); Lifetime's Intimate Portrait (women); CNN's Pinnacle and Movers (business); and Fox Family Channel's Famous Families (guess). C-SPAN's American Presidents profiles the 41 Chief Executives in order--though it won't, alas, cover Grover Cleveland in two nonconsecutive broadcasts.

Who's next?, you're thinking. Comedy Central? Actually, this month the network launched A Comic Life with a Steve Martin bio narrated by director Ivan

Reitman, whose decidedly unfunny unctuousness ("You make audiences laugh all day, all over the world...") made one long for the days when comics would salute their peers by getting drunk and insulting them.

Saturation? Not in the eyes of viewers--many of the programs pull down their network's highest ratings--or of the new competitors and big names jumping on the bandwagon. This fall VH1 adds The Road to Fame, on rising bands; CNBC is preparing the as yet unscheduled In Profile with Bob Costas, on sports, entertainment and (especially) business luminaries; and MSNBC launches Headliners & Legends with Matt Lauer (one hour every weeknight) on Sept. 27. "I can't honestly say there will be huge differences" between Headliners and existing shows, concedes executive producer Tim Uehlinger. "It's taking what Biography does so well and Behind the Music does so well another step forward." But he hopes to use NBC's video archives to turn around episodes quickly in response to news events, in addition to a regular lineup of more time-consuming, in-depth newsmaker and entertainer profiles.

The tearful interviews, the wedding footage and--that sine qua non money shot--the baby pictures: it can be hard for the uninitiated to tell the shows apart. But there are identifiable categories. Educational, middlebrow offerings like Biography and PBS's American Masters aim to be definitive (and, more rarely, hard-hitting), while entertainment channels tend toward frothy love letters like CMT Showcase. Others are hybrids, like Bravo's brainy Bravo Profiles, which delves into artists' creative processes--it's fan mail, but in iambic pentameter. Likewise, Intimate Portrait has a classy roster of "women of substance," which it treats with extreme deference and the Lilith Fair aesthetics of a SnackWell's commercial. "We don't claim to be journalism," says Dawn Tarnofsky-Ostroff, Lifetime's executive vice president of entertainment. "We have a very specific point of view, in the subject's own words."

Last and hardly least, the But-the-Good-Times-Were-Not-Meant- to-Last genre relies on stars' generous willingness to drink, go bankrupt and have their houses burned down in order to create hypnotic TV. Behind the Music delivers on the credits' promise of "Fame...Passion... Heartbreak...Success...Glory" with an Aristotelian three-act structure--rise, fall and rehab--and florid narration: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers "came out of the South--driven by jangling guitars and led by a rock-'n'-roll rebel!" E!'s True Hollywood Story is tart and eager to dish dirt. Compare an Intimate Portrait on Natalie Wood, filled with warm family reminiscences, with E!'s dark narrative of despair and drugs that pulled the series' second-highest rating. "Some of our stories end happily, some don't," says E! vice president of original programming Betsy Rott. "We're not afraid to tell the complete story." And Fame, Passion, Heartbreak, and so on have their rewards: Story began running nightly this month; BTM, which has improved its Sunday-night time slot's ratings 221% since 1997, went to twice a night in May.

Bio programming pays off in more than ratings. In a nutshell: life is cheap. For cable channels, which lack the deep pockets of their broadcast counterparts, bios are TV Helper. Jason Goodman, a former producer for BTM, says an episode costs around $150,000; a biographical movie can cost a few million dollars. The cooperation of the subject can defray costs, not only by allowing extensive interviews but also by providing free, all-important photos. Many biography shows will proceed only with the subject's approval. E! and A&E, which do some shows without cooperation--"It's Biography, not Autobiography," A&E's Cascio likes to say--contend that gives them independence; others say cooperation only improves the final product. But in a BTM on Madonna, says the episode's producer, Goodman, "cooperation" meant the star got approval over interviewees. Executive producer Gay Rosenthal responds, "On rare occasions there has been editorial input, but if I felt it compromised the show, I wouldn't do it."

Life is also like a box of chocolates--and no lousy nine-piece assortment either. The modern star machine and the graveyard of history offer a huge store of subjects, even if a series creates episodes at a 50- or 100-a-year clip. Still, shows are beginning to repeat one another's material. David Wolper, who produced the classic Biography (the forebear of A&E's) with Mike Wallace in the 1960s, enjoys many of the new shows but jokes, "One of these days, my dentist is going to be on there."

But what are these shows teaching us, besides Cher's marital record? In part, they may be encouraging us to focus more than we already do on personalities: to understand the world by examining not processes or social forces but the actions of famous individuals. Many bio shows, of course, make no bones about being plain entertainment, but even higher-minded ones are about celebrity: political celebrities, historical celebrities, religious celebrities (Biography has profiled Jesus and Satan). The camera and the picture tube have affected the way we view history: as a carousel of well-known faces. And lately, those faces are as likely to be entertainers as world leaders. To the average American, was the '50s the age of Ike or of Elvis?

Indeed, part of the fascination of the fluffier shows is precisely that they treat the pop culture by which we keep our internal calendars as real history. Sure, it's funny to hear E! trumpet "the meteoric rise and turbulent run of Three's Company," as if it were the Manchu dynasty, but then again, Jack, Janet and Chrissy offer a pretty sharp picture of post-sexual revolution America. In fact, the bio shows are often at their best--and most successful, ratings-wise--when chronicling TV itself: Ozzie and Harriet on A&E, journalist Jessica Savitch on Lifetime. Even veteran producer Wolper says a TV bio is no substitute for a book: "You forget half of it by the next day." In the end, bio shows may be better at presenting the little picture, showing us how other people--people with bigger cars and more cosmetic surgery than the rest of us--contend with life. Their popularity, says MTV executive vice president Brian Graden, "may be a reaction to a world in which people are moving too fast and with too much input." (Graden, note, works for MTV.)

Educational or not, the success of biography shows seems to have inspired a retro entertainment trend: bio movies. VH1 has begun a series of "true rock story" movies--the second, on Ricky Nelson, debuts Aug. 22--and A&E will air the four-hour bioflick P.T. Barnum, starring Beau Bridges, in September. The thirst for bio TV could finally subside, but thus far audiences have proved, as A&E's protagonist might say, that there's a, um, viewer born every minute. And a corresponding need for stories. You might just want to hang on to your baby pictures.

--With reporting by Harriet Barovick/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Harriet Barovick/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles