Testosterone TV

From series about cars and technology to military programming, a new crop of shows is firmly focused on male audiences.

For about as long as television has been an advertising medium, advertisers seeking a heavily male audience, especially a young one, have turned to sports. More recently, edgy comedy entered the mix. But lately, some broadcasters not heavily invested in sports or comedy are trying to appeal to men with factual programming heavy on testosterone.

Reality series like Dog the Bounty Hunter, Deadliest Catch, Top Gear and other danger- and speed-related series are big sellers internationally on terrestrial broadcasters, general-interest cable and satellite channels and, in the last few years, niche channels targeting men all day.

The foremost practitioner of the genre is, by most accounts, Thom Beers, the executive producer of such hits as Deadliest Catch for Discovery Channel, Black Gold for truTV, Ice Road Truckers for HISTORY and Storage Wars, the second-season premiere of which set ratings records for A&E in the U.S. in July.

Beers sums up his formula for success with male viewers simply: “It’s high risk, high reward in an exotic location.”

Many of the shows Beers produces for his company, Original Productions, based in Burbank and owned by FremantleMedia, involve jobs that meet those criteria.

“Most men have a job,” he says. “They know exactly how much money they’re going to make. They know pretty much what their job is going to be. We take those guys to a place they know they’ll never get to, but they’ve always wanted to know what it would be like. It means, ‘I’m going to drive a truck in the middle of winter, at 40 [degrees] below zero and I may break through the ice, but I’ll make thousands of dollars more than I’ll ever make in a week doing what I do.’ It’s a job they’ll never have in places they’ll never get to. And rewards they’ll probably never reap either.”

Not all of Beers’s shows involve jobs, though. His newest, for HISTORY, is Around the World in 80 Ways, which Beers describes as “a buddy show. It’s two guys who travel around the world. The challenge is that they have to use 80 different means of transportation. I get to tell almost the history of transportation. It’s funny; it’s provocative. A lot of the means of transportation are things you’ve never heard of before. It’s a fun little show.”

Beyond risk, reward and location, Beers looks for authentic characters. “To make a successful show you’ve got to have great characters,” he says. “Casting is really key. You need unique characters with unique skill sets. Authenticity is really important. It’s not like we manufacture or script the shows. People know the difference. The guys who come to our shows are looking for that real, authentic experience.”

For Around the World in 80 Ways, Beers cast Rob Mariano, a veteran of Survivor and The Amazing Race, and Dennis Anderson, the creator of the monster truck Grave Digger.

In a more traditional documentary vein, some executives, like Germaine Deagan Sweet, the VP of global content sales for National Geographic Channels, use a somewhat different approach. Deagan Sweet’s formula for the successful male-skewing factual show: “It’s building and blowing up. How we build things and how we blow them up,” she says.

“The male-skewing audience is an important one,” Deagan Sweet continues. “If you look at our schedule, in the U.S. or international markets, the franchises that pop up as the top performers, the consistent performers, for us and our partners, are the ones that are male skewing. They are series such as Megafactories and MegaStructures, science- and technology-based programs that attract the male-skewing audience.”

Deagan Sweet says National Geographic Channel has always had a focus on the male audience. “I think it’s definitely growing within an expanding market,” she says. “The male-skewing programs have always performed well. It’s been a very consistent market for us, and one we’re not looking to back away from in the slightest. It continues to perform well.”

HISTORY has long used its extensive library of World War II documentaries to build a largely male audience, but lately it’s broadened into more entertainment-oriented fare, like Ice Road Truckers and its own version of the BBC hit Top Gear.

“HISTORY has always been male skewing,” says Dirk Hoogstra, the channel’s senior VP of programming. “We’ve broadened our base by adding entertainment value to the brand. The core viewers have stayed with us and we’ve been able to expand [beyond them]. We’re close to 70-percent male skewing.”

Gary Lico, the president and CEO of CABLEready, says the shows that work with men are the ones that allow the audience to enter into someone else’s world. “We sell the series Hooked: Monster Fish,” he says. “You have these swamp people and gator guys and what have you. Those kinds of things are very appealing to men, which is why they’re showing up on HISTORY, A&E, Discovery and Spike.”

Breakthrough Entertainment’s Greatest Tank Battles series is in its second season on Discovery’s Military Channel in the U.S. and a number of international Discovery channels, where it attracts a strong male audience.

“We’ve had a lot of success with Greatest Tank Battles,” says Ira Levy, the executive producer and a partner at Breakthrough Films & Television. “We’re retelling famous historical events by re-creating them with high-level CGI, so today’s generation can be in that point of view.”

Onto a good thing, Breakthrough’s next venture is Greatest Naval Battles, told in a similar mix of CGI and interviews.

THE NEED FOR SPEED
Also appealing to male audiences are cars and other things that go fast. Solid Entertainment offers five different automotive series and 15 or 20 one-offs, says Richard Propper, the company’s president.

“Men and cars have gone together for decades,” Propper says. “Men love things that are loud, things that move them fast and things where you can succeed against the elements.” A series that takes advantage of this love is Rally On!, which follows the Gumball 3000 super-car rally, a tongue-in-cheek international competition. “The filmmakers ended up following eight different cars all the way to Miami. We have about 30 broadcasters interested,” Propper says.

A more sedate automotive series from Solid is What’s My Car Worth? “It’s something very simple,” Propper explains. “They pick three or four cars that are up for auction, talk about them and drive them. They talk to the owner and a couple of experts to get estimates of what each will sell for and then you see who was right. There’s a little bit of drama.”

“Over the years we’ve had a number of car series that TLC and Discovery have initiated that did really well,” Propper says. “They always said, ‘We’re not going to do a car channel. It’s too narrow.’ It was too narrow until they found out there were huge advertising dollars in it. Then they decided to rebrand HD Theater into Velocity.”

Nat Geo’s Deagan Sweet sees the male niche channels as another buyer that isn’t in direct competition with her own channels. “There are these niche channels setting up that are looking to take advantage of these franchises that they see working,” she says. “We look for channels that are complementary to what National Geographic Channel puts out, mostly general-entertainment channels.”

Beers acknowledges that many of his shows would do well on the male-oriented channels, but he questions their budgets. “I’m sure they would love to have one of those shows, but I’m not sure they can afford that $15,000 per-episode fee. The niche channels are not in the first position. You’ve already gone through every terrestrial and every Discovery, Nat Geo Channel, HISTORY, A&E, before you’ve gotten to them.”

GENERATION Y
The real challenge for established channels and the newer male-skewing channels is reaching younger men, usually defined as 18 to 34, a demographic group that is famously difficult to attract.

Beers says many of his shows appeal to younger men. “That 18-to-34 male audience is our sweet spot. Our average age is 41 years old. We certainly see an opportunity there. 1000 Ways to Die draws a really young male audience, 15- to 21-year-olds. That’s a tough audience to hit.”

As much of the younger male audience has abandoned TV for the Internet and computer games, several executives suggest that the way to reach them is through gaming and multimedia applications.

The subject matter of Breakthrough’s Greatest Tank Battles wouldn’t seem to attract a younger male audience, but Nat Abraham, the company’s VP of distribution, says the visual presentation of the show does.

“It’s very gamelike,” he says. “It’s no longer just history told through newsreels. It’s part video-game graphics and coming out of that we’re doing mobile games. Kids can actually play the tank battles using the assets we have from the CGI within specific games that are connected to the television show but exist on their own merit. It reaches out to a younger demographic without alienating the older demo that would love a show like this.”

A longer version of this article appeared in the MIPCOM 2011 edition of TV Real.