TV Column: ABC scores with Jaycee Dugard interview – Washington Post
An average of 15 million people tuned in to ABC’s “Primetime” on Sunday night to get their first extended look at Jaycee Dugard.
That makes Dugard’s interview with Diane Sawyer television’s most-watched summer newsmagazine telecast in more than seven years.
More from Lisa de Moraes
Pulitzer Prize winner, Peabody recipient, Medal of Freedom honoree — Lisa de Moraes is none of these, but she is an authority on the bad direction, over-acting, and muddled plot lines being played out in the TV industry’s executive suites.
More than seven years ago, on June 20, 2004, former president Bill Clinton gave “60 Minutes’s” Dan Rather an exclusive interview about his upcoming memoir, “My Life,” and clocked 15.8 million viewers.
More than seven years ago would have been about 11 years into the 18 years that Dugard was held captive by registered sex offender Phillip Craig Garrido and his wife, Nancy, after snatching the then-11-year-old from a rural school bus stop in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Dugard, now 31, was raped and gave birth to two children by Garrido.
The Dugard interview resulted in ABC’s biggest summer audience in the Sunday 9-11 p.m. time slot (with non-sports programming) in nearly 11 years. That goes back to Aug. 27, 2000, when ABC’s monster ratings magnet “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” was still going strong and pulled in an average of nearly 23 million people in the time slot.
Nearly 11 years ago would have been about seven years into the time Dugard was forced to live in a series of sheds in a hidden back yard that her abductors had set up to isolate her from their neighbors.
“Wow. Now I can walk in the next room and see my mom,” Dugard told Sawyer about her life since being freed from captivity. “Wow. I can decide to jump in the car and go to the beach with the girls. Wow. It’s unbelievable. Truly.”
Oprah ‘Undercover’
Back in January 2010, Oprah Winfrey helped a little reality TV series called “Undercover Boss” when she devoted a whole episode of her syndicated daytime talk show to previewing the series — right before its post-Super Bowl launch on CBS.
Now it’s time for the hit series “Undercover Boss” to return the favor.
The ratings-lean OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, has purchased telecast rights to reruns of the now-hit series to help attract viewers to its original programs.
Here’s the catch: OWN — a co-venture of Winfrey’s company and Silver Spring-based Discovery Communications — will have to share access to the “UB” library with Discovery’s TLC network, which is also part of the deal with CBS Television Distribution, the CBS division that distributes its reruns and other syndicated fare.
In Monday’s announcement, CBSTVD said that the two cable networks would “determine their independent scheduling strategies with regularly scheduled episodes of the hit series” starting in the fall of 2012.
“The self-contained episodes will serve as strong anchors to complement OWN original programming,” OWN senior veep Scott Garner said optimistically in the announcement.
In case you’ve missed it: In each episode of “Undercover Boss” the CEO of some big corporation — Waste Management, 7-Eleven, NASCAR, Subway — goes undercover, camera crew in tow, to mingle with his minions. And — usually after the second ad break — this CEO discovers that some nincompoop of a middle manager is mangling His Vision and making life a perfect hell for his hard-working employees.
After the third ad break, this “undercover” boss reveals himself and gives that middle manager the dressing-down he or she so richly deserves, after which cash is dispensed in the direction of some of the more put-upon employees — right before the final commercial break — and They All Live Happily Ever After.
“ ‘Undercover Boss’ is a perfect fit for OWN and TLC as it focuses on improving lives, which very much reflects both networks’ missions,” CBSTVD President Scott Koondel said in Monday’s announcement — putting to rest forever those rumors that he does not have much of a sense of humor. Because we’ve heard TLC — the network of “Extreme Couponing,” “Jon & Kate Plus Eight,” “19 Kids and Counting,” “Toddlers & Tiaras,” “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding,” “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” and “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” among other programs — described as many things, but “improving lives” has not been among them.
Harry Smith’s move
“We have players on the bench at NBC News who would be starters at other networks,” Brian Williams boasted to advertisers last May in New York when NBC announced that it was developing a Williams-anchored newmagazine for its prime-time lineup.
But apparently none quite like CBS News’s Harry Smith. NBC News announced Monday that it was “honored” to have Smith join its “corps of correspondents” to “contribute his signature first-rate reporting” to NBC’s new newsmag.
Smith is maybe best known for having hosted the CBS morning infotainment show “The Early Show” and its predecessor, “CBS This Morning,” for 17 years.
That all ended about seven months ago when CBS News announced that it was giving Smith and the other members of “The Early Show” on-air team the old heave-ho-ho-ho. Smith stayed on at CBS News until just last Friday as substitute anchor for CBS’s evening newscast, “Face the Nation” and “Sunday Morning.”