Friday, January 22, 1999
The University Daily Kansan
Entertainment
Section A·Page 11
After comic strip success, Dilbert to debut on UPN
The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Dilbert, the loser of the corporate world, looks like a winner on television.
The cubicle-bound engineer who suffers the tortures of office life in Scott Adams' comic strip is the star of Dilbert, a clever new animated series on UPN that gives the struggling network a reason to live.
Dilbert debuting 7 p.m. Monday, doesn't suffer so much as a paper cut in the transition from the funny pages. The show skewers the absurdities of the workplace with wit as pointed as the hair of Dilbert's evil supervisor. "Am I late?" saves the ten boss.
Minion: "Right on time, sir."
Thumbs twiddle, boss finally returns: "Am I late now?"
Am I late? says the top boss, strolling into a meeting.
*minton.* "Right on time, sir."
*top boss.* "Oh. In that case, I've got time to make some phone calls."
Minton: "Yes. But it's not because you're an inconsiderate dolt. It's because you're more important than us."
"You have 937 messages," intones the machine. "All of which are marked URGENT."
Think of Fox's The Simpsons with its clever social satire, but drop the warm and fuzzy family trappings. *Dilbert* is part of a chain gang, not a clan. And they're breaking rock piles for The Company not because it makes sense, but because Period.
welcome to Dilbert's world (maybe yours?), and don't forget to check the voice mail.
The series' fidelity to the comic strip reflects the involvement of Adams, who is co-executive producer. Executive producer Larry Charles, whose credits include Mad About You and Seinfeld, helps make it work as a TV show.
An odd couple visually — the neatly groomed Adams wears understated jeans and T-shirt, while Charles favors a colorful blend of long hair, beard and pajamas — they profess to be in perfect sync about what matters
DILBERT
■ What: New TV series
■ When: 7 p.m. Mondays
■ Where: UPN
Voices: Dilbert will be voiced by Daniel Stern, who did the adult voice of Fred Savage in *The Wonder Years* and is in the movie Very Bad Things. Chris Elliott of *Something About Mary* will do the voice of Dogbert.
in life and in Dilbert.
Both read physics books. For fun, Both are 41, and from New York City. And they both want the series to make viewers laugh by being smart as well as silly.
"It's got its share of slapstick and abuse of authority and talking animals," said Adams, "Then there's another level of, 'Oh, my God, that happened to me.' That has always been the strongest Dilbert element.
"The subtler part, the more subliminal and metaphorical kinds of things, those are the reasons you'll be able to wrap your mind around it."
But comedy is still the goal here, the producers say, so don't fret about being forced to think too hard — and feel free to bring the kids.
The satire may be beyond them, but the characters offer the requisite visual cuteness for the younger set.
There's Dilbert (voiced by Daniel Stern), the ultimate office corps nerd whose hopeless wardrobe is matched by his socially clueless behavior.
He's joined on the home front by the manipulative Dogbert (Chris Elliott) and ego-bruising Dilmom (Jackie Hoffman). Making Dilbert's office life unbearable are the Pointy-Haired Boss (Larry Miller), slacker colleague Wally (Gordon Hunt) and hostile Alice (Kathy Griffin).
That's letter-perfect casting, including Stern as the crucial lead drone. The actor has been heard to good effect before, providing the voice-over for The Wonder Years.
Adams said he and Charles
were determined not to do the series unless it had great voice actors. "We felt like we could make everything else work, but you can't bluff if you have the wrong voice.
"When we found Daniel Stern, that was the big, 'Ahh, this is possible,' because he has that vocal quality, that nice-guy thing that comes through regardless of the dialogue. It's vulnerability without getting you to that uncomfortable thing you wouldn't want to watch for 21 minutes.
"A lot of actors wanted to give us Barney Fife, stuttering, 'I'm such a nerd.'"
The big question, given the saturation marketing of the Dilbert strip through books and innumerable other items, is what took it so long to get to television.
Adams said he has been talking to prospective partners for about five years.
"As Dilbert grew and grew, we got better meetings and met a higher class of people who were more serious than speculative," he said. When he and Charles hooked up through Sony's Columbia TriStar Television, the next step was finding the right network.
UPN might seem an odd choice, given its difficulties in attracting an audience. Fellow fledgling network WB, which has successfully targeted young viewers, posted nearly double UPN's household rating last week.
But Adams and Charles saw opportunity at UPN, which agreed to air 13 episodes. That commitment, a rarity now in the competitive TV market, gives the show a chance to develop and gain an audience, Charles said.
"If it's good, it will be an important part of redefining what UPN is," the cartoonist said. "And how cool is that? It allows me to be part of something that's bigger than the page is."
Then there's the big-fish-littlepond aspect, which appeals to Adams.
And much bigger than a cubicle.
Narrow-casters say forget the masses: TV is smaller world
PASADENA, Calif. - The television industry's latest buzzword, narrow-casting, doesn't sound at all inviting.
The Associated Press
It's the inverse of broadcasting, which seeks programs that appeal to as wide an audience as possible. A successful narrow-caster grabs a small, dedicated following and holds on tight.
In an ideal world of narrow-cast television, dad sits on the couch watching a football game on ESPN, mom's in the kitchen picking up decorating tips on HGTV, little Timmy watches Nickelodeon's cartoons in the playroom and teen-ager Jenny blares 'N Sync on MTV in her room.
Maybe they'll meet later and talk. Probably not.
Television is losing its status as an electronic campfire for the family to crowd around. With digital TV and hundreds of channel choices around the corner, those embers are threatened.
Narrow-casters, like the WB and cable networks CNBC and Nickelodeon, are either gaining in viewers or making fistfuls of money, sometimes both. Old-time broadcasters are losing viewers and foundering financially and creatively.
Kellner believes television will follow the road that radio has taken during the past decade or so. The most successful radio companies have fragmented listeners into ever-smaller groups: a station for people who grew up with the soul music of the '70s, another for fans of alternative rock and talk radio for people who like their politics conservative.
"I don't particularly look at us as one giant audience any longer," said Jamie Kellner, chief executive officer of the WB. "I look at us as groups of viewers that have to try to be satisfied."
The WB is nominally a broadcaster and won't turn away viewers, but it really doesn't care much about anyone older than 30.
Kellner's chief competitor, UPN, failed miserably with its stated goal to reach as many viewers as possible in America's broad middle class. Now UPN is looking to narrow-cast, eyeing an audience of the boys who made Waterboy a hit movie.
executives of the traditional Big Three networks. in meetings with TV critics here last week, all promised not to give up on broadcasting. CBS Entertainment President Nancy Tellem blamed narrow-casters for many of network television's troubles.
"We have to maintain being broadcasters," she said. "And I think the problem is that the other guys are really buying into the niche programming, and, in my opinion, it'll become indistinguishable."
Based on CBS' audience demographics, rivals consider the network a narrow-caster for people older than 50. That's not by design, though, and CBS is trying to bring its base.
ABC President Patricia Fili-Krushel said her goal
"I don't particularly look at us as one giant audience any longer. I look at us as groups of viewers that have to try to be satisfied."
Jamie Kellner chief executive officer of the WB
was to make ABC the first network for as many viewers as possible.
"We want to be a broadcast network," said Alan Wurtzel, an ABC senior vice president. "And by a broadcast network we want to be a network that has something for everybody."
Yet in some ways, ABC has hedged its bets by drawing up plans for dozens of spin-off networks for the digital age. Some day, there may be a separate ABC channel for soap opera, another that airs comedies and still another for dramas. And Fill-Krushel's own top entertainment executives seemingly contradicted her by saying they really don't create programs for anyone older than 50.
Broadcasters listen intently to advertisers who want to hawk their wares to young people on shows designed to appeal to them. It may ultimately be a strategy antithetical to the idea of broadcasting.
NBC's decision to fill its schedule with comedies featuring hip young urbanites — designed to entice hip, young and wealthy urbanites — has cost the network respect and viewers, said Dorothy Swanson, founder of Viewers for Quality Television, a nonprofit citizens' watchdog group.
New NBC Entertainment President Scott Sassaa seemed to agree. He said he wants the network's shows to simmer down the sex, be less focused on New York and cast a wider ethnic net for actors. "We want to be as broad as possible," he said.
Shows such as "ER" still pull together millions of people who talk about the episodes at work the next day. Even the WB's Kellner believes there will one day be a show to match the popularity of "Seinfeld."
"You'll have those kinds of shows happen," he said. "But when you look at the gap between these shows and the rest of them, it's getting harder and harder to do that."
Television producer Bruce Nash, Hollywood's hottest maker of reality shows, was attracted to the TV business by viewing experiences like "Roots," the miniseries about a slave family that absorbed the nation two decades ago.
He wonders whether the miniseries would have the same impact in today's TV world. It's possible that if "Roots" went up against his "When Good Pets Go Bad," the marauding animals would probably get a higher rating.
And that, he believes, would be a shame.
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