Kurt Andersen ~ television

WHILE WE WERE DOING Spy, I was also producing television shows.

I created a pilot for NBC News called After Hours. A decade before The Daily Show premiered, it was The Daily Show if The Daily Show had actual network broadcast journalists as its deadpan anchors and correspondents. The anchors were Stephen Frazier (now of CNN) and Deborah Norville (now of MSNBC). There was something mesmerizing – and disconcerting -- about such straight-ahead newsreaders delivering, for instance, the week’s body counts in real wars around the world as if they were sports scores. Among the pieces (written and produced by Graydon Carter) was a profile of the singer and dancer Charo by the distinguished economics correspondent Irving R. Levine.

I was an executive producer on a late-night pilot for ABC called Zero Hour. A few years before Politically Incorrect premiered, it was Politically Incorrect if Politically Incorrect had been hosted by Gordon Elliot (now of The Food Network) with a panel that included Richard Belzer, Jane Curtin, Penn Jillette, and Ron Silver. We produced four shows on each of four evenings that were broadcast on the ABC affiliate in New Haven.

Once Spy was successful, the president of NBC, Brandon Tartikoff, asked us to produce primetime comedy specials for NBC. The first was a deconstruction of celebrity called How to Be Famous, and starred Jerry Seinfeld just before Seinfeld became a hit. The second, a 1992 year-in-review countdown show, was called Hit List, and starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

spy tv And in 1992, we produced a pilot for NBC called Spy Pranks, hosted by Kevin Nealon of Saturday Night Live. One of our pranks involved sending a clown to deliver balloons to John Gotti at his mafia social club, and for another we pretended to set up a rabbit-meat-based fast food chain called Bunny Burgers. Nine years later, the unconnected but uncannily similar-sounding and possibly trademark-infringing reality series Spy TV (“hidden-camera reality series that features comical pranks on real people”) premiered on NBC. (The logo at left is from the opening of Spy Pranks .)

In 2001, when Barry Diller was running USA Networks, he hired me as an adviser to help shape the company's programming, which I continued to do under the company's two subequent corporate owners. The Trio channel was the most important result of that collaboration.

Sometimes I appear on TV. For about a year in the 90s I was the weekly cultural commentator on VH1’s Top Ten Countdown. During 2002 and 2003 I hosted an interview program called Face Time on Trio. The shows still occasionally pop up in reruns, and a few of the interviews are online (but not, alas, my conversation with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog). And last year for BBC4, I was the "presenter" of a documentary called How Brit Trash Conquered America.