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‘Girls’ Going Strong

Sep 21, 2008  •  Post A Comment

While reality shows tend to come and go, “The Girls Next Door,” starting its fifth season on cable’s E! Entertainment next month, has shown surprising stamina.
The series, which focuses on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s three girlfriends, has become E!’s highest-rated show and made Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Williamson into celebrities in their own right.
Though it may have been built around the ultimate male fantasy, the audience for “The Girls Next Door” turned out to be mostly young women in the 18-to-34 demographic, according to Lisa Berger, executive VP for original programming and series development at E! Entertainment Television.
Ironically, E! rushed the show onto the air originally because it was looking to hold onto its male audience after “The Howard Stern Show” left the network.
“I think everyone, including women, like to look at women. Eye candy always helps. But at the end of the day, it’s about creating great stories,” Ms. Berger said. “You kind of live vicariously through these girls. It’s behind the curtain, and there are not a lot of shows that take you behind the curtain. And there’s this mystique with Hugh Hefner and the girls and their relationship.”
“I think ‘The Girls Next Door’ continues to be successful because viewers enjoy the inside look at life at the Playboy Mansion and they also relate to at least one of us,” said Ms. Marquardt. “I think it’s fun for viewers to take the journey with us, and the fact that we have a lot of fun along the way doesn’t hurt.”
But the show’s success may be sowing the seeds of its end, said executive producer Kevin Burns.
“Season three was about girls using their fame to pursue their own individual interests, but I’d say in this current season, it’s really how fame is pulling them in different directions,” Mr. Burns said.
Mr. Burns said he hears the rumors that one of the girls may be leaving the mansion this year.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if within the next four to six months, there’s some changes,” he said. If something happened while the show was being edited, Mr. Burns said, he would find a way to fit it into this season’s episodes.
On top of that drama, there’s the fact that the show has an 82-year-old leading man who doesn’t need the money the show generates.
“I don’t know. Could this season be the last? Or could next season be the last? I don’t know. There’s talk of a sixth season already,” Mr. Burns said.
The network certainly hopes the girls stay with the show.
Last season it averaged 1.4 million viewers per episode, tripling the network’s prime-time average, and has grown every season since it debuted.
“We see a long life for the series on the network, but again, you never know what happens in real life. And we’ll be there along the way to capture it all,” Ms. Berger said.
Mr. Burns said he’s had discussions with the network over what to do if one girl leaves, or two girls leave.
Looking at Spinoffs
One possible outcome could be a spinoff.
“We always are looking how we can exploit franchises,” Ms. Berger said. “We are constantly talking about how can we take this very successful franchise of ‘Girls Next Door’ and do more.
And so there are multiple ideas in the works, but nothing’s official yet.”
Ms. Marquardt is working on another series already.
Mr. Burns was talking to an executive at Travel Channel, which recently ordered five more episodes of the series “Food Paradises” and a six-part special on Las Vegas from his production company, Prometheus Entertainment.
“They wanted to do something on the world’s sexiest beaches,” Mr. Burns said.
They were looking for a beautiful woman to host. So Mr. Burns suggested Ms. Marquardt.
“When you think about a beach show, it is beautiful scenery, lust for life, freedom, energy, and she encompasses all of that,” said Michael Klein, VP of content for Travel Channel.
Mr. Klein notes Ms. Marquardt comes with an enormous fan base that the male-skewing Travel Channel is eager to tap.
The other girls may well appear on the beach show as well.
“I know Holly wants to do Mexico and Kendra’s really excited about doing San Diego, where she’s from. So you’ll see guest appearances from time to time,” Mr. Klein said.
“Girls Next Door” is the only reality show produced by Prometheus Entertainment, which specializes in nonfiction and has produced projects to tie in with movies including “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones” and Tom Cruise’s upcoming “Valkyrie.”
Mr. Burns became friends with Mr. Hefner after producing a rare two-hour episode of “Biography” about the Playboy founder for A&E in 1994.
“We had a weird connection,” Mr. Burns said, because they both drew Frankenstein comics when they were kids. “He said at one point to me, ‘You and I would have been best friends as kids, but we grew up years apart and miles away.’”
He shot several other specials on Mr. Hefner and Playboy that drew high ratings and A&E approached him in 2004 about doing an “Osbournes” type of reality show with Mr. Hefner and his ex-wife and kids.
That show idea was dismissed, but Mr. Hefner suggested there might be a good show in his current lifestyle, living with three young ladies. They did a test shoot of a show called “Hef’s World,” but A&E was busy with other projects and passed.
“I showed it to Lisa Berger, with whom I had worked at Fox Television Studios,” Mr. Burns recalled. “And Lisa saw the test and absolutely loved it But she said: ‘The one thing I’m most interested in is the girls. Could you go back and shoot some additional footage on just them because I want to see if there’s anybody home,’ meaning, are they interesting enough to focus on.”
He shot more footage “and what I found was three fascinating women,” he said.
Mr. Burns sees the show as a sort of unscripted comedy.
“I kind of joke one of my favorite shows as a kid was ‘Green Acres,’” Mr. Burns said. “I kind of think of him as Eddie Albert, but he’s got three Eva Gabors. And they all live in Hooterville, if you catch my drift.”
The show exists at the whim of the girls and Mr. Hefner, who laid down three conditions for doing it. The first was that Mr. Burns shoot it, and the second was that it not be cruel, as so many reality shows are.
And third, he said, he wanted to have a good time.
“If I’m not having fun doing it, and if the people doing it aren’t having fun, then I don’t want to because I don’t need the money,” Mr. Hefner told him.
Just Everyday Life
Mr. Burns said that in some ways, the show is more real than most people would think. “The world is already unreal, so you don’t have to fake that up,” he said.
“We never cast the girls to be in the show, we never initially even paid the girls to be in the show,” he said. Sometimes, he added, “It’s that we don’t show everything that’s real. If there’s something that doesn’t fit the storyline or is too personal or too private, I don’t think it’s necessarily relevant to the show.”
And the show never dwells on the intimate details of what goes on in the mansion.
“I don’t think you really want to see what people think they want to see,” he said.

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