For one week every January, the epicenter of reality TV is Washington.
That’s when network execs, producers, agents — and even non-pros convinced they’ve got the Next Big Reality-TV Thing — descend on the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Washington to participate in four days of fevered pitching and industry navel-lint gazing.
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.
This year, about 2,000 people made the pilgrimage to the confab known as Realscreen Summit — by far the biggest gathering in the conference’s 14 years. From Sunday evening through Wednesday afternoon, the hotel was locked down, and only Realscreen attendees were allowed in.
History Channel announced that it was bringing its entire programming team to the summit; A&E announced that it would empower its programmers to green-light development for projects on-site. One top Hollywood talent agency sent a team of agents that set up more than 1,000 meetings from the hotel.
“Every single cable network is here — every single one,” marveled one producer.
Everyone came laden with product to sell at market. Santa Monica, Calif.-based Kinetic Content, the company behind History Channel’s “Harvest” and NBC’s “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers,” brought a nonfiction series called “Parole,” profiling young people going through the juvenile parole process — a world typically closed off to the public and media.
The Canadian production company AllScreen Entertainment, partnered with the Naked News Network, said it would bring its pitch for a reality series that goes behind the scenes of the cult Web network, which features women disrobing while delivering the news.
U.K-based Zig Zag Productions (“Politicians Behaving Badly,” “Madonna and Guy: Where Did It All Go Wrong?”), partnered with American Media Inc., said that it would pitch a fly-on-the-wall reality series that follows reporters from various bureaus of the National Enquirer — the gossip publication that broke details about the Monica Lewinsky story as well as John Edwards’s love child.
Organizers set up a separate room — a sort of speed-dating shark tank for TV pitches. Producers circled the room, moving from table to table; at each table sat a rep for a different network. After a few minutes at one table, a Realscreen organizer announced that their time was up and that they had to move to the next table. If a network suit heard a really hot pitch, the exec had to decide immediately whether to buy the show to keep the producer from pitching it to the competitor, sitting a few feet away.
But over the conference’s run, pitching could erupt anywhere — in the hallway, in the bar. Even in the Starbucks, where two producers sold a show about a guy who hooks up veterans returning from action with producers of military-type TV shows and movies — all in the time it takes to drink a cappuccino.
At an evening party, a private investigator was presenting herself as a fount of reality-TV possibilities. A guy dressed in a pirate suit showed up for the keynote speech to promote his new show idea, based on an actual “pirate ship” somewhere in Florida that has a bar and a dinner theater where they reenact pirate stories while people imbibe. Another guy was shopping ideas: one a reality series about a sea-turtle rescue hospital; the other about a recreational scuba-diving operation run by a “crazy host” who’s an ex-Navy SEAL.
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