putting the j in jjosh

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This is footage I recently came across when I transferred all my digital8 tapes (yes!) to miniDV. It’s from a TLC promo I shot in my living room, for Thanksgiving in the Junkyard — an all-day Thanksgiving marathon of TLC’s show "Junkyard Wars." It was when I was still relatively new at TLC, when it was still fun, still a bit under the radar. We put a film-look effect on it, and cut it up with some clips from the shows, and it went on-air. It was kind of a great feeling to see this crazy stuff that I shot on my living room floor end up on a major cable channel.

(Fun fact: for months after that shoot, whenever I would use my drill it would smell like mashed potatoes.)

(Fun fact 2: I have still have that drill and it still works.)

I can never keep straight the order of the ages, is it Golden then Silver then Heroic then Iron? All I know is that supposedly societies always feel like they always just missed the Golden Age — it’s always in the past — and that they’re living in the Iron Age — the one that’s really really bad and is only going to get worse.

When I started working at TLC, the channel had just started making the move from being The Learning Channel to the more design-y living-y TLC. They were still showing science specials like "Hyperspace" hosted by Sam Neil, they were still showing "Junkyard Wars", and they still ran a block of what they called "Adrenaline Rush Hour", shows about cars and engines and stuff. They had just acquired the American re-make of a British series called "Trading Spaces", but the host — a woman named Alex something-or-other — wasn’t really working out.

It was a fun place to work, producing promos for shows like Monster Machines or specials on King Arthur. I remember paying a friend to make a 3d animated growing brain for a spot about how Mega Machines was going to "magnify your brain"! I filmed the Thanksgiving in the Junkyard spot that is above. It felt kind of scrappy, like we were Discovery’s younger brother that no-one really paid much attention to.

Then they switched the host on Trading Spaces to Paige Davis, got Ty Pennington to be the carpenter and everything began to change. News began to come in that the ratings for Trading Spaces were really good. We used to have these meeting every Monday morning where all of TLC would sit in a small conference room and go over the past week’s ratings. That would be it, it was literally a group of people in a room listening to someone read show titles and numbers from a printout. And that was that person’s job, you know, to analyze the ratings! Crazy. (Never mind that ratings are completely nonsensical and based on an industry-run tautology designed to keep advertisers involved and investing. But that’s another rant.)

As the ratings got even better, things began to change. We began to see more design-y shows on the channel — What Not To Wear, While You Were Out — and the science-y stuff began to vanish. We also began to get more sponsors and advertisers who wanted to spend more and more money. We would be commissioned to do spots that highlighted all the times Trading Spaces used Lowe’s paint. Then TS’s sponsor would change and we’d have to highlight all the uses of Home Depot.

More money came in too. We were doing more original shoots, more shoots on film (nice), bigger and more elaborate shoots. This was a blast. I flew to England to do a shoot with Henry Rollins, LA to work with Jason Priestly and Natasha Henstridge. One of my colleagues did a shoot for a Trading Spaces special that was a full-blown Busby Berkely-style musical with top hats, original music, confetti, dancing — all shot on 35mm. Crazy budget. Paige Davis started to get weird, flashing her bra at reporters, sticking money in it; a sex tape came out. I did a shoot with her and she was really odd, swearing like a sailor.

They oversaturated the market. Trading Spaces spun off Trading Spaces Family (ech) and TS was on like 3 times a day, and the other shows were interchangable — carpentry shows, remodeling shows, flip that house shows, fashion shows. And the ratings began to slip. But no-one really panicked about it, it wasn’t talked about. We could sense that something was happening. A lot of it was that we were burning out on these damn shows. They’d still throw in the odd car show or two (they were very worried about completely abandoning the "male viewers") but those "lifestyle" programs wore the producers out. They were so formula, with their big ending "reveals" and montages of "remembering all the fun we had.".

At some point the ratings debacle became the elephant in the room. Suddenly everything was going wrong, there were huge problems that had to be fixed, people needed to be blamed. Management changed, the "oversaturation" was acknowledged so TLC cut back some (no more TS Family, thank God), a bit of panic began to set in.

Eventually, the advertisers would clue in to the problem, and cut off the money supply, and the Golden Age would end. There was this weird period where we all knew it was going down the tubes but the advertisers had already bought a ton of advertising for the shows. This middle area where they knew they needed to cut back on spending, but the money was already allocated. There was a sense that trouble was coming, but for the immediate future, everything seemed just as rosy as it had ever been.

That was a weird time. Hard to wrap my mind around. To know that the trouble was just around the corner, but in the meantime, go ahead and spend a crazy amount of money on a production in Chicago for a show that no-one’s really hyped about. Strange.

I got a flashback of that in the elevator the other day, listening to people talk about the market and the coming recession and the layoffs and the cutbacks. It hasn’t really hit Max and I yet, working for the cable channels that we’re working for, but I have a vague sense that it’s out there. That if people stop buying products, it has to trickle into advertisers not funding as much programming, spending as much on advertising. It hasn’t hit me in an immediate sense, but I know people who’ve been laid off, I know people who are telling me they aren’t going out to eat anymore.

The aftermath of the TLC story is that after the hyperinflated Trading Spaces era, they calmed down a bit and got a bit more down to earth; still able to reap some benefits from the boom, but behaving a little more sensibly. At least that’s how I read it (is it true MD?) — and then I left. Is there some parallel to be made in the current, looming, economic crises? Something to do with the overinflation of worth, with oversaturation? There’s credit stuff in there to be sure. And with everyone (rightly) panicking about what’s to come.

But I can’t help feeling some of the same feeling I had at the time at TLC, which was this: that it wasn’t real! That we were living it up based on fake credit and bogus market stuff! And that while it’s awful that it’s going to tumble down the way it will, afterwards it should be at least a bit more sensible, a bit more grounded in reality. Real, you know?

Like a drill being thrown into cranberry sauce.