Green TV

April 2007

Thanks to the growing awareness of global warming, documentaries about the environment have found new audiences around the world.

By Peter Caranicas

It was a sign of the times in Hollywood when, on the evening of Sunday, February 25, the Paramount Classics film An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award for best documentary feature. Produced and directed by Davis Guggenheim, the movie centers on former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to raise awareness about global warming. Feature documentaries have grown in popularity in recent years, with Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins attracting sizeable audiences. But Truth, also a success at the box office, was different. Devoid of drama and sensationalism, it calmly presented the dry, illustrated lectures of the man who is widely believed to have lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush because he lacked charisma (though he did, in fact, win the popular vote).

But Truth made up for its absence of excitement by presenting a compelling subject matter about which millions are passionate, and by solidly backing up the scary premise that unless the world collectively takes steps to reduce the growth rate of energy consumption and the emission of greenhouse gases, the climate will change, sea levels will rise, and life as we know it will be endangered.

Helped by the film, Gore’s campaign has drawn new recruits to the environmental movement in the U.S., and the public is far more aware of the issues he champions than it was only two years ago. In other countries, especially in Europe, “green” initiatives and even green political parties have taken a prominent role in setting the public agenda. For the television industry, the result has been a boomlet in documentaries about the environment.

“It’s definitely a trend,” says Barrie Osborne, a producer of New Line Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy who is now developing and will produce a four-part environmental documentary series for television called Ocean. The project will focus on the world’s oceans “because they are important to our life and we should do everything we can to preserve them,” Osborne says.

The thrust of Ocean will be an examination of the interaction of man and the bodies of water that cover most of our planet. Each of its four hour-long parts will have a different focus, but all will combine themes from mythology, history, culture, politics and economics into an exploration of our complex relationship with the ocean. The series will run the gamut of environmental issues, “such as the ocean’s acidification, pollution, the impact of fisheries and agricultural runoff,” says Osborne, “but I really want to tie all these things together through the use of myth.” To that end, he has assembled a team of eminent scientists and writers to assist in shaping the project.

SMART PARTNERSHIPS

The distribution of Ocean is being handled by Helen Grattan, a veteran of New Zealand’s TVNZ and Explore International (now National Geographic Television International). She is now the head of Hellion, her own New Zealand-based company, which specializes in the marketing and distribution of natural-history programming. “We’re promoting Ocean at MIPTV, but we’re meeting beforehand with U.S. networks just to get a feel for the marketplace,” she says.

Grattan confirms that Ocean will be an international co-production. “It’s the sort of programming that works better if it’s a co-production,” she notes. “That way you get a real feel for the needs of various territories and the elements they want to put into it. For example, the U.S. broadcasters will add their own slant on it. Once we identify the partners, we’ll move quickly.”

According to Osborne, who is also based in New Zealand, story lines and a production team for Ocean are already in place. At MIPTV, he and the production company Octtane expect to announce four high-profile film directors, each of whom will direct one of Ocean’s episodes. Planning for the series began last fall and development will take place throughout 2007, according to Osborne. Production will start in early 2008, and the series should be ready for delivery late next year.

THE SKY DOWN UNDER

New Zealand is at the forefront of environmental consciousness, perhaps because of that nation’s proximity to the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. Equally aware of environmental issues is nearby Australia, where ABC Enterprises just launched Crude, a one-off, 90-minute documentary described as “the epic, true and sobering story of how the world became addicted to oil.”

Crude was produced in-house at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation by Dr. Richard Smith, an award-winning science producer. ABC Enterprises launched the program internationally at MIPTV. “Crude takes a step back from the day-to-day to get a big perspective on oil,” says Karen Dacey, the manager of program sales at ABC Enterprises. “It looks at how petroleum was born, going back to plankton in the ocean millions of years ago, and takes the story right up to oil’s becoming the lifeblood of the modern world. It’s a provocative story.”

ABC Enterprises will also be showcasing another environmental program at MIPTV: Peak Oil, which is part of the ABC network’s long-running Four Corners series and is produced by its current-affairs department. “Whereas Crude is more of an event program, Peak Oil is more from the current-affairs point of view,” explains Dacey. “It looks at … why oil prices have been so high lately, and how long the world has got before oil runs out. It also investigates the issue of unexploited reserves, and why investment hasn’t been going on since the ’90s to look for more oil.”

Peak Oil and Crude have both aired on ABC, which commissioned the programs internally and fully owns them.

BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

Another major environmental initiative is coming out of France T�l�visions Distribution (FTD), which markets programs produced by the France T�l�visions group and other product for which it acts as an agent. At MIPTV, FTD will be offering Earth from Above, which aired as a prime-time documentary on France 2 starting last October; it debuted to a 24.2 share and 5.7 million viewers domestically.

Hosted by a renowned aerial photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand—who is receiving the inaugural Green World Award at MIPTV—and inspired by his book of the same name, Earth from Above is available in HD in four 110-minute parts or eight 52-minute segments. The big-budget series (produced for approximately �4 million) presents a breathtaking portrait of the planet, captured via Arthus-Bertrand’s photography. The program focuses on the fragility of the earth’s ecosystems and shows how easily they are damaged by human activity.

According to Eric Verniere, FTD’s international sales manager, although other documentary series have taken on environmental issues, Earth from Above is the first one to do so in prime time. France 2 was the series’ commissioning broadcaster, with France T�l�visions as the key partner. There was “major financial input both from France 2 and from France T�l�visions Distribution for international TV and video sales,” he says. In addition, the program was presold to Belgium’s RTBF.

Looking ahead to the program’s international prospects, Verniere says, “There has been interest from major terrestrial broadcasters in Spain, Germany, the U.K., Korea and Japan.”

So successful was the original series, says Verniere, that France 2 has already commissioned a second season of four 110-minute segments, again with Arthus-Bertrand as presenter and photographer. “There is definitely a growing demand for this type of documentary,” he adds. “It’s becoming more of a prime-time topic, and green commissions now appear on more major channels.”

“Zeitgeisty” is how Stephanie Hartog, the senior VP of international formats at ALL3MEDIA International, describes the subject of environmentalism. “Environmental issues are the issue in the Western and developed world,” she says. “You read about it every single day in papers. And now even some countries in Asia are starting to pay serious attention to it.”

With that in mind, ALL3MEDIA is offering WA$TED! Waging War on Waste, both as a completed series of ten half hours and as a format. The series launched on TV3 in New Zealand in February and Hartog intends to take the format worldwide.

WA$TED! combines environmental issues with game-show elements that include a cash incentive for being more green. The series focuses on a different family each week, audits its waste volume and energy usage with the show’s “eco calculator,” and confronts it with the truth about its habits’ long-term impact on the planet.

Following the assessment, WA$TED!’s host and ecology expert, Francesca Price, puts each family on a “green regimen” to clean up its act. After further tracking the family, Price re-calculates its household carbon footprint and awards it a cash prize based on the amount by which it has reduced its waste.

WA$TED! is a co-production of New Zealand-based Fumes TV and South Pacific Pictures for TV3. Fumes TV’s Carthew Neal, the show’s producer, says that the timing for the launch of WA$TED! is “perfect,” and that “environmental awareness has reached a tipping point globally, and mainstream audiences are looking for ways they can reduce their impact on the planet.”

The key to WA$TED!’s success, he notes, is that “the series combines the simple self-improvement formula but in the burgeoning environmental area, playing on the increasing modern-day guilt of our wasteful ways.” Neal adds that the program’s “unique household footprint measure has been developed to visually provide a before-and-after illustration of the progress each family has made.” This, he believes, combined with the program’s offer of cash as a reward for being less wasteful, will ensure its success in other territories: “Once they learn it will save them cash, it’s a done deal!”

“We have high hopes for the format in local versions around the world,” says Hartog. “The show is entertaining and fun, plus it’s a subject everyone is talking about. It includes a lot of scary facts about what we are doing to our world, like all the greenhouse gases we’re producing, and how we’re living incredibly uneconomically in our use of resources. Anyone with a family and kids will be interested.”

In order to make WA$TED! work as a format, ALL3MEDIA is cooperating with government bodies and environmental organizations in different countries to come up with local formulas for calculating waste that can be incorporated into the show’s “eco calculator.” “We need to make sure that each household’s carbon footprint is appropriate to that territory,” says Hartog.

“It’s all done in an entertaining fashion,” she adds. “We’re not trying to nanny people, we’re showing them what they can do. It’s an intelligent and entertaining way to educate audiences. The idea isn’t that you have to move to a mud hut, but there are easy things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint.”

In the U.S., a major initiative in the arena of environmental programming is under way at the Sundance Channel, has launched The Green, a weekly 9 p.m. block of three hours focusing on environmental topics. The Sundance Channel now claims to be the first television network in the U.S. to have established a major, regularly scheduled programming destination dedicated entirely to the environment.

SEMINAL SUNDANCE

The concept for The Green came from the Sundance Channel’s board of directors, according to Christian Vesper, the senior VP of acquisitions, program planning and scheduling. “A few of our board members thought it was an interesting and worthwhile programming area for us to explore, and we agreed,” he says, “especially given our pedigree as part of the broader Sundance family. Who better than us to take on the environment as a programming challenge?”

After all, An Inconvenient Truth made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006, and the Festival’s founder, Robert Redford, is a longtime environmental activist. Redford himself will not host The Green but will present the block and will appear several times in the programming, says Vesper. The destination’s hosts are the award-winning journalist Simran Sethi and a community advocate and MacArthur Fellow named Majora Carter. Both are well known in civic planning and global business circles.

Leading off each edition of The Green is the original program Big Ideas for a Small Planet, a new documentary series of half hours presenting designers, products and processes that are on the leading edge of green thinking. Each episode revolves around a different green theme as it spotlights a specific innovator or innovation that has the potential to transform the way people live. The individuals profiled include scientists, product designers and entrepreneurs. Recurring expert commentators provide a big-picture context for each week’s stories.

Big Ideas for a Small Planet is produced by Scout Productions, which also produced Queer Eye for the Straight Guy for Bravo and The Fog of War, the Errol Morris documentary feature about Robert McNamara.

The Big Ideas episodes are paired with a thematically complementary documentary premiere. For example, the debut episode of Big Ideas, which explores alternative fuel sources, is followed by the television premiere of A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, a look at the past, present and future of the world’s oil reserves. Among the other titles slated to air during the block are Waste=Food, Crapshoot: The Gamble with our Wastes and Art from the Arctic.

The Green, says Vesper, also includes several interstitial programs, such as Eco-Biz, The Ecoists and Global Focus: The New Environmentalists. “I bought a number of documentaries from international sales agents and producers to fill out the block,” explains Vesper. His sources include TV2 in Denmark and the BBC, as well as distributors in the Netherlands, Canada and elsewhere. “About half the films we’re using to fill out the block come from overseas,” he says.

Another environmental-programming initiative originating in the U.S. is the deal coming from a new partnership between the production company Lightworks Producing Group (LPG) and Ecorazzi.com, a pro-green website. Through the agreement, LPG and Ecorazzi are developing a weekly television series that will round up “green news” centered on celebrities and other notables who are visibly contributing to environmental causes.

ECO-FRIENDLY ENTERTAINMENT

Karen Shapiro, a two-time Emmy Award winner, veteran producer and former Entertainment Tonight New York bureau chief, is leading the development of the show, which is being described as “eco-fun, eco-sexy.”

Unlike other projects, where the TV program comes first and is later supported by a web presence that promotes it and sometimes also distributes its content via broadband, the LPG-Ecorazzi project originated on the web and is only now migrating to television. “We were researching another environmental project and came across the Ecorazzi website and were immediately quite taken by it,” recalls Jeffrey Weber, the president and CEO of Lightworks Producing Group. “Here was an opportunity to work with a group that was already heavily into this content. We loved their take and their attitude and their hip approach, so we spoke to them about collaborating on a TV show.

“What usually happens in the TV business is that you start with a TV program and then decide how to morph a web component out of it,” he continues. “In this case, we worked the other way around, starting with a very robust website and then looked at how we can work with this site in the TV medium. The two will feed each other back and forth.”

As this article was being written, few details had been released about the show, named Ecorazzi.tv. “We’re thinking 15 30-minute episodes,” Weber says. “The time is so ripe for this kind of program. We want to capitalize on the interest of celebrities in the environment. It doesn’t take very long as you’re spinning the dial to get totally consumed with all the junk that’s out there—Britney’s latest tattoo, where Anna Nicole will be buried and so on—but to use the power and attraction of celebrities for this kind of positive content is really exciting.”

Weber cites Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Julia Roberts, Scarlett Johansson, Bono, Orlando Bloom and Edward Norton as some of the ecology-minded celebrities the new show could approach. “We’ll be producing a fun, edgy, informative, pro-eco show that highlights the efforts of today’s hottest celebrities,” he adds, “but this won’t be a mere snark-fest. Celebrities are trendsetters who inspire their fans to follow their lead.”

RED CARPET TURNS GREEN

Celebrities also figured prominently in the program One Degree, a broadband site dedicated to climate change developed by The Weather Channel Interactive. The website named the ten individuals, groups or companies that most influenced global climate change discussions in 2006. Not surprisingly, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore topped the list. Others included California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for his state environmental initiatives, the activist Laurie David (the wife of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David and partial financier of An Inconvenient Truth), and President George W. Bush (for his negative influence via his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol).

By the very nature of its programming, The Weather Channel presents a nonstop succession of programs dedicated to climate issues and—by extension—to the environment. Last December, the cable network launched The Climate Code with Dr. Heidi Cullen, a countdown series focusing on the ten biggest climate stories of the year. In the series, Cullen, a climatologist formerly with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, investigates the impact of changes in the earth’s climate. Her stories include the emergence of “green evangelicals,” the effect on people of spiraling gas prices, and the emergence of smart cars.

And now this article comes full circle, back to the Oscars. The Weather Channel’s Cullen also played host at the Global Green pre-Oscar party on Wednesday, February 21, a few days before the Academy Awards themselves. Oscar nominees like Al Gore walked down the famed red carpet on their way to Hollywood’s Kodak Theater on February 25. But at the parallel event days earlier, the carpet was green. And unlike the other news and entertainment networks there that were reporting on who came with whom and what everyone was wearing, Dr. Cullen asked the celebrities about their views on the environment.