I arrived at TCA, the television critics' tour in L.A., just in time to meet one of this fall's TV stars who I think is gonna break out.
Meet Georgia. She and 21 of her fellow fighting pit bulls — rescued from the Michael Vick estate — arrived at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah on January 2 of this year, not long after the National Geographic Channel had started filming there for its series "DogTown." John Garcia (pictured), one of Georgia's trainers at the sanctuary, told me she was one of Vick's best fighters. Which means she could have been one of Best Friends' toughest cases. Instead, after seven months of 24/7 attention, she was ready for a massive meet-and-greet, accepting affection from countless strange hands in a big noisy room — and not only loving it, but returning the love. I'm no animal trainer, but that's a helluva turnaround. Wouldn't you watch that?
"Dogtown" is of particular importance to my readers, or should be, because Missouri is (or was, in 2006) the state with the most illegal puppy mills, and Kansas is in third place, thanks to lax enforcement. Long before Michael Vick was associated with anything besides football, HBO's "Dealing Dogs" (which I reviewed) was calling attention to the horrors of dog-breeding operations that violate the law.
"DogTown" (which returns Sept. 5 to begin chronicling the stories of the Vick dogs) arrives just in time for Nat Geo, which has gotten a lot of mileage out of Cesar Millan and the "Dog Whisperer" but is clearly ready for something else. "DogTown" is also a good example of a new breed, so to speak, of documentary TV series. Rather than focus entirely on a single exceptional person, they take entire professions that might be interesting enough to make a documentary feature film and, with seemingly little tinkering, turn it into an ensemble docu-series. So here it's not about one superstar dog trainer, but about a sanctuary with a lot of dedicated but otherwise unexceptional professionals whose collective work is bigger than the sum of their parts
Two thousand eight is shaping up to be the year of this kind of ensemble docu-series. I think it's great that TV has found an irresistible new format that lets viewers into the lives of truck drivers, deep-sea fishermen, military personnel, oil drillers, ghost hunters, container inspectors, motorcycle mechanics and tattoo artists — and soon, tunnel-diggers ("Sandhogs," a new History Channel series). It's certainly more interesting than following the so-called lives of a mobster's daughter or TMZ's flavor-of-the-week.
Two companies are at the forefront are this new wave of docu-series and they both had new series to present on Thursday. I missed the panel for "L.A. Hard Hats," the new one from Original Productions, which gave us "Ice Road Truckers," "Deadliest Catch" and more. But I did get to interview Craig Piligian of Pilgrim Films & Television after his panel to promote "Sandhogs." Piligian has had his hand in a pretty wide range of shows, from the first season of "Survivor" to "Worst Case Scenario" to "Ultimate Fighter." The most fateful decision he made was to create a show based on a Bay Area TV personality named Mike Rowe who would do anything. "Dirty Jobs" made a huge star out of Rowe and, it's fair to argue, led to the current wave of ensemble docu-series.
Of course, the Pilgrim program I am most fond of is "Greensburg," the docu-series about the rebuilding of Greensburg, Kansas, as an eco-village, which is currently airing on Planet Green. I visited Greensburg in February and wrote about it as well as the show itself. While we were talking, Piligian let slip that "Greensburg" has been renewed for a second season, which is wonderful news that I did confirm last night with the Discovery-owned channel. I'll follow up here on "Greensburg" after Planet Green makes its presentation today at TCA.
Dogtown is a great way to educate the public about the stupidity of banning breeds, and discriminating against a dog breed as a whole.
Posted by: Sarah | July 10, 2008 at 02:01 PM
Mr. Barnhart,
For the record, Craig Piligian did not "create" Dirty Jobs. Mike Rowe did a series of stories on a show in San Francisco called Evening Magazine entitled "Somebody's Got To Do It". The stories were so popular that Mike went to his friend, Craig Piligian, and together they shopped the concept to Discovery. The rest is history.
Just so you know.
(Rita: For the record, Mr. Piligian says he is the creator of "Dirty Jobs." See http://tvbarn.com/story/38015/ --AB)
Posted by: Rita Kammerling | July 10, 2008 at 03:01 PM