Seeking New Stars: The Desperate Hours

Television has a well-deserved reputation for discovering stars, whether it’s Bruce Willis’ “Moonlighting” before he ever died hard in a theater, Sally Field’s recently grounded round-trip flight from TV to big screen, or the various movie roles allotted to the once-unknown casts, if that seems possible, of “Friends” and “ER.”

If recent headlines are any indication, however, television is losing the battle to keep pace with this astronomical demand for fresh talent--as evidenced, among other things, by MSNBC calling Phil Donahue out of the wilderness to host a talk show and the transformation of “Survivor” castaways into instant TV personalities.

With so many hungry channels to feed, TV can’t seem to fabricate stars fast enough, explaining the willingness to reach into the past as well as tendencies to provide celebrities the sort of vanity vehicles normally reserved for small theaters and thrust anyone who has achieved the smallest measure of fame into the spotlight.

Cable channels are particularly prone to these impulses, in part because they aren’t as compelled to reach a mass audience as broadcasters, freeing them to pursue more niche-oriented concepts.

Donahue’s name recognition, coupled with whatever goodwill he engendered during all those years in national syndication, thus offers MSNBC the hope that a fraction of that audience--all it will take to be a success by the channel’s less exacting standards--will welcome the white-haired host back like an old friend.

The term is used advisedly, since Donahue, at 66, is hardly a poster child for the MTV or WB network crowd. Fortunately, news is one of the few areas somewhat sheltered from the media world’s well-practiced ageism, a venue where many leading anchors are eligible to collect Social Security and “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace, 84, can talk about cutting back on his workload instead of reminiscing about his retirement.

By contrast, virtually the rest of the entertainment landscape is caught in a nonstop, demographically driven search for the fountain of youth, to the point where having bug-eating or surviving immunity challenges on your resume is more attractive than “MASH” or “All in the Family.”

So it is that “Survivor’s” Colleen Haskell landed a co-starring part in the film “The Animal,” while the program’s first winner, Richard Hatch, became a correspondent for “Entertainment Tonight.”

“Survivor: The Australian Outback’s” Alicia Calloway, meanwhile, has parlayed her physique, chiseled by her work as a personal trainer, into a series of on-air roles--hosting “Antarctica: A Voyage to the Final Frontier” for the Outdoor Life Network (yes, that’s a real channel on your digital cable tier somewhere) and being hired as the health-and-fitness correspondent for WNYW, the local Fox station in New York, beginning this month.

Sharon Chang, an agent at IMG, which represents the likes of Tiger Woods and John Madden, was undaunted about taking Calloway on as a client even though the clock on a “Survivor” contestant’s media viability begins ticking almost as soon as he or she gets voted off the show.

“Everybody was just saying you’ve got to capitalize on it very, very quickly,” said Chang. “But I had more of a long-term vision for her.”

Granted, transplanting people who gain fame in one arena into TV is hardly new, though one can argue the bar on who qualifies has been lowered even from the day when athletes like Don Meredith and O.J. Simpson proved that acting is harder than it looks.

At the same time, cable’s appetite for low-cost original programming has brought to life all sorts of oddities built around more traditional celebrities, apparently inspired by the notion that a half-hour of Bill Murray doing just about anything is good enough to intrigue some viewers.

As a result, you get “The Sweet Spot,” a new Comedy Central series that features Murray playing golf with his three brothers. The show has a certain charm if you are, say, a junior in college under the influence of six or seven beers, but its approach is so offbeat as to make you wonder if the Murrays could have pitched anything that the channel wouldn’t have bought.

Still, Comedy Central General Manager Bill Hilary said that’s the point--that the last thing TV needs is another conventional sitcom built around a marquee film actor, though he was too polite to mention since-departed vehicles for Geena Davis, Bette Midler and others to make his case.

“If we’re going to have a big star, like Bill Murray, we want to do something that no one else would do,” Hilary said.

“Ours is a harsh, discerning audience. That 24-to-34-year-old audience doesn’t wait around. You can arrest them for 30 seconds, but you can’t keep them. ... If they don’t have it their way, they won’t be back again.”

Showcasing celebrities in unconventional settings is theoretically a way to get that younger audience’s attention, at least for a while. So MTV gives us Ozzy Osbourne as a mumbling real-life sitcom dad; singer Chris Isaak plays a version of himself in his eponymous Showtime comedy; and “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David does the same in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”--notably, a modest success for the pay channel despite drawing a much smaller audience than the sitcoms crafted for “Seinfeld” co-stars Michael Richard, Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

That said, even the major networks aren’t immune to cable-like flights of fancy. NBC’s foraging for a star with built-in appeal propelled chef Emeril Lagasse from the Food Network’s kitchen into a sitcom, where he demonstrated that it is indeed possible to have a tough time playing yourself.

Fox, meanwhile, with its tentative plans for another “Celebrity Boxing” special, continues to prove that any measure of fame or notoriety has value--especially if the possessor is willing to be pummeled about the head, either figuratively or literally, in exchange for a few more minutes in front of a camera.

No one has suggested yet that Donahue strap on the gloves to promote his MSNBC series, which makes its debut this summer; still, given the desperation already on display, the idea sounds less like satire or science fiction than it once might have, as programmers scan the night sky for ways to arrest an audience, hopefully without resorting to tactics that will get themselves arrested in the process.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at brian.lowry@latimes.com.