TMZ TV Aims To Titillate

August 09, 2008

If Perez Hilton and Paris Hilton produced a TV show together, it would probably look a lot like TMZ TV.

No celebrity scandal is too risque for TMZ TV, no celebrity spat so bitter that it can't be packaged for TV insomniacs, gossip hounds and those hard-working wage earners who, at the end of a long day of paying the bills, just want to kick back and be reassured that celebrities have it just as tough as they do. The celebrity life isn't all about red carpet soirees, glitzy movie premieres, late-night talk-show appearances and swag bags - there are perp walks, rehab stays and dust-ups with the paparazzi to deal with as well.

TMZ TV, which bills itself as a fast-paced hybrid between Entertainment Tonight, The Smoking Gun TV and Cops for those viewers who can't get enough celebrity dirt from the muckraker website TMZ.com, trades in such fare as: 'Smile, you're on a real cop show!' 'Quiz: match the celebrity with the apology, ' 'Britney's Top 5 parenting tips' and 'Five things you didn't know about Lindsay.' If you have to ask who Lindsay is, TMZ TV is probably not for you.

TMZ.com managing editor and TMZ TV host and executive-producer Harvey Levin wouldn't have it any other way.

Such celeb-reality videos as David Hasselhoff's scarfing down a hamburger while his daughter pleaded with him to stop drinking, or Beyonce's tumble off the stage at an Orlando, Fla. concert last July, or Faith Hill's lashing out at a fan during a Louisiana concert (``You don't go grabbing . . . somebody's husband's balls!''), or Katie Couric's mocking Dan Rather while preparing for a live shot in November are grist to Levin's TV mill.

And he makes no apologies for it.

"We don't do agenda,'' Levin said, during a tour of TMZ TV's Hollywood newsroom, before it premiered last fall. "We don't do red carpets. We don't do junkets. Publicists don't control us the way they control the traditional media. If you're a traditional entertainment show and you want to do an interview with Tom Cruise, the publicist can call you up and say, `If you do that story, we're not going to give you Tom Cruise.' Well, we don't want an interview with Tom Cruise. We want to be seen as fair, but we're not going to fear publicists. We don't on the website, and we don't with the TV show.''

You can take away his respect, Levin added, but you can't take away his freedom.

"It's very freeing,'' he said. "Publicists know they can't bludgeon us. They know they can't control us. They'll work with us when we do a story, rather than getting mad, because they realize we're a place where they can manage a story - even if it's a bad story. But we're never going to back down or tell a story in a tepid or meek way.''

Levin has a few choice words for those who say TMZ TV is the embodiment of everything they don't want to see on television, that it's reprehensible and voyeuristic and degrading and evil and the epitome of low-class, lowest-common- denominator TV fare.

"That's so totally not true,'' Levin said. "Bogus, bogus, that's a totally bogus argument. I love these sanctimonious anchors on cable who say, `I refuse to read this story.' You know what? They cover this stuff because people are interested in it. I don't apologize for doing Paris Hilton. The fact is, the world is like a magazine. We're not doing the front page of a newspaper. People do want to know about the important things in life. But they also like features. They like snarky. They follow these celebrities, and they want to see what they look like when they're not wax figures on a red carpet.''

TMZ TV's newsroom, a glass-walled roof-top penthouse overlooking a food court in a working-class corner of Hollywood, is full of empty desks on this day - the sign, Levin says, of a newsroom that works, The reporters are all out on the street digging up dirt, rather than sitting at a desk waiting for the phone to ring.

"What we're doing is not the fall of western civilization,'' Levin insisted. "Celebrities are just people who other people invest in. They invest in them by going to movies. They invest in them by buying DVDs, by buying their clothes. They want to know something about them. We don't just do stories about celebrities in trouble - though we do stories about celebrities in trouble.

"Look, people want variety in their lives. They don't just want to hear about Iraq. They want to hear about a different rack.''