FOX’s Mike Darnell

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

Mike Darnell has an
unabashed passion for television. As a child he was transfixed by his favorite
shows, which included All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Happy Days and
Kojak. He wouldn’t just watch shows—he would track their ratings and try
to predict their chances for success. He then became an actor just so he could
be in television. When the acting career didn’t pan out, he took an internship
at a FOX station and then moved his way up in the network. Today he is the
executive VP of specials, alternative and late-night programming at the FOX
Broadcasting Company. The shows he oversees are nothing if not provocative.

TV
FORMATS:
Where do you get ideas for reality programs? What inspires you?

DARNELL: I never know what will inspire
me. It could be something I’ve read about; something I’ve seen; something that
happens to my wife, something that just pops into my head. At FOX we’re very
unusual for network executives. My division and I come up with about 50 to 60
percent of what we put on the air, and then we purchase the other 40 percent.
Whereas, as far as I know, other networks purchase 100 percent of their reality
shows, so it’s something we do uniquely and it has benefited us. Joe
Millionaire was
an internal invention. Temptation Island was an internal invention. My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé was an internal invention. Of
course, we’ve also had success with stuff we’ve bought. American Idol is the biggest success we’ve ever
had. We like to do both.

Inspiration is a funny thing. I did a special called Who Wants to
Marry a
Multi-millionaire?
It was a very big hit but also very controversial. It came from an odd
inspiration. I was in Parsippany, New Jersey, with my wife at her cousin’s
wedding. This was late 1999, and while I was there, Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire was
just starting to air in America. There hadn’t been a prime-time game show on
network television for some 20 years, and Millionaire was doing huge numbers, and its
momentum was building. This was driving me crazy because I wasn’t even in Los
Angeles to talk about it to anyone. I was upset about that and as I was
watching this wedding, it occurred to me, people want to win a million dollars,
what else do they want? They want to get married, and I combined the two
notions into Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire? If you can’t win a million, maybe
you can marry somebody with a million.

Lots of different things serve as inspiration. Sometimes it’s a pitch,
but if you get 100 pitches, maybe one or two are interesting enough to produce.
You know what it is about pitches? I have heard some really, really bad
pitches, but I don’t get enough of those, because at least those are funny.

Generally, pitches are just kind of mediocre, and you feel apathetic
about them. They’re just the next generation of the same idea. A lot of times
if something hits big, you get the same idea ten times, like when the movie Hitch came out, ten people in a row
came in pitching, “This is the real-life Hitch, where a guy will teach someone
else how to pick up women.”

When Dumb and Dumber was a big movie, every pitch for two weeks was, “We’ll
find the dumbest people in America!” It is rare that you get pitched an idea
you love, so it’s the combination of the two, inventing our own shows and
getting pitches [that] has really worked for us. The other way that people get
ideas is by finding formats from England that have worked and then buying them.
ABC has done this several times. British shows don’t always work here, but they
can increase your odds of getting a hit show.

TV
FORMATS:
You began your career as an actor. What did you learn from that experience that
you can apply to your work today?

DARNELL: I don’t think I learned a lot from
being an actor that applies to my work today, because there was another side of
me that was pressing for this job. I was always in love with TV. I was mesmerized by TV as a kid, not just as an
observer. I would overanalyze the programs. I would wait for the fall preview
issue of TV Guide,
and try to predict what was going to work and what wasn’t. I would read ratings
and analyze them by the time I was 11 or 12 years old. Although there was a
time I thought I wanted to be an actor, I really just wanted to be in
television. I didn’t have a love of acting. I didn’t want to be in plays. So
when the acting slowed down, I just knew I wanted to do something in
television. I got my first job in 1986 as an intern working at the local FOX
affiliate in the news division and worked my way up. That taught me so much. A
lot of people who work in reality TV in America started in some form of news.
News is reality in its own way. You learn that you have to titillate, [present
information] very quickly and on a budget. There were a lot of things I learned
in local news that I applied as I got into specials and reality series.

TV
FORMATS:
What elements does a reality show need in order to be successful?

DARNELL: You have to make a lot of noise in
reality. It helps to have a very interesting set of concepts to begin with.
Whereas for a sitcom or a drama sometimes you can grow the audience over the
course of a few episodes, in reality TV it works better if you have a
provocative or talked-about concept before you even get the show on the air.
After that, it’s important that the show does the same as a scripted
show—entertain and pull emotions out of you. It has to make you feel sad,
happy, excited or terrified, the same way that comedies and dramas work to pull
those emotions out. I’ve always thought that reality shows have to do the same
thing.

TV
FORMATS: What has kept American Idol fresh year after year?

DARNELL: First of all, they’ve got
fantastic producers, Simon Fuller, Nigel Lythgoe, Ken Warwick and Simon Cowell.
There’s just an amazing amount of talent associated with that television show.

One of the keys to its success is the massive change we make to the
show each season. But that’s only part of it. The other part is FOX’s ability
at scheduling and promoting the show. The network does a great job at building amazing
anticipation for it. American Idol has long surpassed being a hit TV show. It’s a TV
phenomenon, right up there with the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards.

TV
FORMATS:
What is your answer when people say FOX copies shows from other networks?

DARNELL: Do we copy?! [Laughs] Look, it’s part of the business.
Everybody copies everyone else. It’s just sour grapes on behalf of everyone
else when we get a hit show. But this summer alone, there was Rock Star:
Supernova, The
One, America’s
Got Talent––they
are all variations on a theme and they were taken from American Idol, but you haven’t heard us cry.

TV
FORMATS: Many producers in the reality-TV business complain that it is hard to
copyright formats.

DARNELL: That’s right, it is, and producers
will pitch a million versions of the same idea. But it happens in the drama
genre, too. Look at CSI. It became a success and there have been countless detective and
forensic-themed shows. The drama producers do it as much as anybody else,
including us. We get accused of it sometimes because we take an idea, add a
twist, and it’s a success. That’s what makes people crazy. Trading Spouses, Wife Swap; Nanny 911 and Supernanny. We do them well and we are proud
of what we do.

I will tell you that in the last three years, you have not heard a
peep out of us when others take our ideas, because that is the nature of the
business.

TV
FORMATS: Do you look at trends in other markets to see what might work for you?

DARNELL: Of course we do, and again, if
something is airing in England and doing gangbuster numbers, it does have a
tendency to work here. That doesn’t preclude [our looking at shows in] other
countries, like Holland, France and Italy. Generally, if a show works in
multiple territories, it will work in this country.

TV
FORMATS: Can you tell us about the idea you had for a special that documented
the crash of a jumbo jet?

DARNELL: I like pushing the envelope, and
I think that’s what FOX is known for. At the time, Dateline on NBC had been getting good
ratings showing crash tests of automobiles. It occurred to me that they must do
the same kind of testing with jumbo jets, which they do. So that was the basic
idea—if watching cars crash is interesting, it might also be interesting
to see what kind of safety measures they look for in plane-crash tests. I
wanted to have cameras inside the plane as it crashed, just as they have in
cars, but I think everybody here ended up thinking in the long run that it was
too dangerous.

TV
FORMATS: How much creative freedom do you have at FOX to follow whatever vision
you have for a show?

DARNELL: I have a lot of creative freedom.
I still have to show my ideas to my superiors, like anybody, but once [they
approve them], generally they trust me to make it the best show possible and
also go in the creative direction I think is the best for the show.