How does that fable go again, the one about the goose and the golden eggs?
ABC executives should be brushing up on their Aesop, because their decision to bring “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” back in January as a thrice-weekly series has the aroma of dead goose.
The prime-time quiz show, the network announced last week, will return as a regular part of the schedule Jan. 11. It will air Tuesdays from 7-8 p.m., Thursdays from 8-9 p.m. and Sundays from 8-9 p.m. (WLS-Ch. 7).
Making way is the lightweight David E. Kelley detective series “Snoops,” a cancellation the new-show-starved Fox ought to pick up but has not. Other ABC changes have yet to be announced, but “Sports Night,” at a minimum, is gone from the new Tuesday lineup.
Like the farmer in the fable, you can understand ABC’s eagerness to get as much gold out of “Millionaire” as it can. The network hasn’t had much luck with its other new shows, and during a trial run in August and then again for 18 nights during November sweeps, the clever and undeniably addictive “Millionaire” has been a genuine television phenomenon.
Over the 18 November episodes, it drew an average of 24.2 million viewers, good enough to make it the season’s second most watched show, between “ER’s” average of 26.4 million viewers over just 10 episodes and “Friends’ ” 21.6 million over 11.
And probably most amazing, in an era when whole-family television was thought to have gone the way of leaded gasoline, it has been popular across the age spectrum, drawing about 20 percent of both the children and the 18-to-49-year-olds watching TV at a given moment.
But as anybody who has shoveled through a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate in one sitting knows, restraint is the better part of sensation. Think of “Saturday Night Live.” Characters that at first seem fresh and funny in just weeks become stumbling nags, broken down from overwork.
The moral here: What was great in dollops grows dull in abundance.
Turning “Millionaire” into a television series, instead of keeping it a periodic happening, simply makes it too easy to take for granted.
Already, Fox’s quick and aptly named knock-off “Greed” is looking entrenched, diluting the prime-time game-show franchise. Last week, Fox announced its prime-time game show would stick around for six more weeks. Coincidentally, the official moral of the goose-golden egg fable is “Greed oft o’er reaches itself.”
Already, “Millionaire” bears scars from the heavy lash of marketing: Chicago’s Jellyvision, makers of the “You Don’t Know Jack” series, whipped out a “Millionaire” CD-Rom game in time for Christmas, and there is now a book, too, surely one of the great reads of the century.
Already, the catch phrase “final answer” is a cliche, almost reflexively referenced in the media, in conversation and in the first six words of the ABC “Millionaire” news release.
And already, some viewers are grumbling that they’ve seen enough of “Millionaire.” It’s not a very complicated show, and its addictive hold seems more like that of the computer game Tetris than of heroin. It can be broken once you reach a plateau with it.
ABC surely would still consider the inexpensive-to-produce show a success if the viewership numbers dropped by even a third. But that’s the thing: They don’t have to drop.
Instead of making it a regular (yawn) presence, keep bringing the show out for multi-night runs, with great fanfare, when it is most valuable to ABC, during every sweeps period: November, February, May and even the less important July sweep.
This takes advantage of “Millionaire” being people’s first love; its sudden reappearance reminds them that any other game shows they are flirting with were just ways to pass the time.
And this makes “Millionaire” into a concept every TV programmer pays lip service to but few are lucky enough to have fall into their laps: event television, the kind of thing you go out of your way to sit down in front of.
A “Millionaire” intermittently surfacing is a special event, more like a Super Bowl than a sitcom episode. But a regularly scheduled “Millionaire” is a once-magical fowl whose health and egg production are in inevitable decline.
Rabbit Man: Speaking of morals and fuzzy little creatures, the USA Network’s Hugh Hefner biopic (7 p.m. Sunday) is an unexpected delight.
I only watched it, of course, for this article. But from the start, “Hefner: Unauthorized” hooks you with its aggressively unconventional point of view. It’s told by Bobbie Arnstein, the longtime Hefner personal assistant who killed herself in 1975, in the movie’s very first scene. She is, in Natasha Gregson Wagner’s remarkably affecting portrayal and J.B. White’s smart, skeptical, often funny script, rather jaunty in spite of this unfortunate outcome.
In a series of deftly chosen episodes, Arnstein guides us through Chicagoan Hefner building his empire by making sex, in the form of idealized, airbrushed women, into a respectably middle-brow interest. The death, though, casts a veil of sobriety over all that passes, a hint that the vaunted Playboy lifestyle may have been a 1950s man-child’s dream but it also could take a heavy toll.
If, in the end, White and director Peter Werner pull their punches a bit, coming down on the side of Hef as a crusader for freedom rather than an exploiter of it, it’s certainly more understandable than the Larry Flynt movie doing the same for him.
Randall Batinkoff is a perfect Hef, self-justifying and always holding his emotions back.
