The Continuing Vision of the Strike-Bound TV World
Monday, January 14th, 2008An announcement today from CBS:
CBS has ordered three new alternative/reality series for broadcast later this year — the biweekly celebrity talent contest SECRET TALENTS OF THE STARS, the hidden camera game show GAME SHOW IN MY HEAD and the search for AMERICA'S TOP DOG. The series were announced by Ghen Maynard, Executive Vice President, Alternative Programming & Entertainment Content for New Media, CBS Paramount Network Television Entertainment Group.
SECRET TALENTS OF THE STARS, a biweekly celebrity talent show, will uncover some of the most fascinating and unique secret talents of your favorite film and television stars, whether it be singing, dancing, magic or even acrobatics. Celebrities will compete in a tournament-structured format to determine who has the best hidden talent. Each performance will include a lineup of professional judges to provide their point of view — but it's the viewers who get to vote for which celebrity impressed them the most. In the results show, viewers' votes determine which celebrity gets to keep showing off their talent and who must go home.
GAME SHOW IN MY HEAD, a new half-hour series from executive producers Ashton Kutcher & Jason Goldberg ("Punk'd," "Beauty and the Geek"), is a hidden camera game show in which contestants wear an earpiece as they go about life in the city and are instructed by the host back in the studio to do stunts. If the contestants can perform crazy, outrageous and often embarrassing tasks in public, they can go home with big money. However, if they fail to perform one task, they'll lose all the money they earned thus far and go home empty-handed. It's all about how far the contestants are willing to go to win GAME SHOW IN MY HEAD.
AMERICA'S TOP DOG (working title) is a new one hour-long series where "man's best friend" can help its owner win big money! Owners and their pets — from "pageant dogs" to those dogs simply trained at home — will live together and battle it out in a dog competition that puts the dog's relationship with the person who has raised and trained it to the test. In the end, only one team of loving owner and faithful dog will emerge the winner in this dog-eat-dog competition!
Now, in any given year, networks are going to order unscripted stuff. But the ongoing strike makes that kind of thing all the more likely. And with something like "Secret Talents of the Stars," you can get celebs on the air in a format that shouldn't invite picket lines. CBS hopes.
