On Air in the Land of Cotton

By Nancy deWolf Smith   Breaking Greenville 

TruTV Thursdays 10:30 p.m.

Greenville, Miss. is a small town of about 34,000 people surrounded by cotton fields and other flora of the Mississippi Delta. Among the fauna are the employees of two television stations that supply the cast of TruTV's new reality series "Breaking Greenville." They range from serious-minded African-Americans, some of whom seem embarrassed to be part of the TruTV project, to a perky blonde "anchor" from Connecticut whose goal in life is to occupy the same pinnacle as talk-show host Kelly Rippa. Also present are a couple of gentlemen with white hair and flashing teeth, including a musical-theater buff named David Lush, who are spending the twilight of their careers mentoring virtual nitwits.

Think of various movies you've seen about big ambition at a small TV station--"Up Close and Personal," for instance, and "To Die For"--add the (sometimes unintended) parody subtext of a mockumentary like "Best in Show," and that's the basic flavor here.

Styled as a ratings duel between WABG (the ABC affiliate) and WXVT ( CBS) the show confirms almost everything we already knew or suspected about local TV stations. It is amusing. But never forget: While "Greenville" invites us to laugh at the incompetence or low-budget haplessness of the journos down in the Delta in one of the country's dinkiest markets, the truth is that the big-city stations and networks have gone just as far south in their way.

Even so, a reality show, with its camera crews and do-overs to get stunts right, etc., would be difficult to pull off at a station where real work was necessary for commercial-financial reasons. This is not so true in Greenville.

WABG and WXVT do appear to be under the supervision of experienced news directors and managers. At bottom, though, such stations are nurseries for every journalism-school graduate who ever had their saucer eyes trained on the bright lights of the TV big-time.

What is less clear is whether some of them are as spectacularly clueless as they appear to be. Take the Kelly Rippa wannabe, Lucy Biggers, who is about a year and a half out of school and introduced as WABG's morning-show anchor (not to be confused with prime-time anchors, weather anchors et. al.) It's not her fault that the most exciting interviews she gets are with a farmer and a Goth-ish teenage singer-songwriter who've been filmed already by a competing station. It may have been for the reality show only that when the teleprompter conked out during a broadcast, Ms. Biggers was seen crawling around with her backside in the air trying to untangle a chord and get it to work again.

No one can say Ms. Biggers is not shrewd, or won't go far in her chosen career. But how would you feel if you were her boss, and asked for game-changing ideas of how to boost ratings and received Ms. Biggers' suggestion: a live broadcast from a viewer's home. This is supposed to whip the competition over at WXVT? The station where another blonde, the zaftig and lucid Callie Carroll, has thrown down the ratings-race gauntlet by weighing herself on camera--and launched a get-healthy campaign that features her dancing, her pillowy bosom certainly heaving, with a co-anchor who's giving it his all but looks as if wishes he were never born.

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