Is TMZ Ready for TV?

TMZ.com, the runaway Internet hit focusing on celebrity gossip, showed up on that other box in your living room on Monday night. But is TMZ the television show any good?

The question everyone's been asking, from the LA Times to USA Today, is the obvious one: when you're running a blog-style website and a time-slotted television show, where do you break stories? Harvey Levin, co-founder of TMZ.com, had prepped a response: "When something is not time-sensitive ... we'll be smart about it." Levin told reporters he was sitting on a bombshell for Monday night's opening. "It involves a star doing a really crazy thing," he told the LA Times. "It was caught on surveillance. We haven't put this on the site yet."

So what was the bombshell? The show opened with surveillance video of Pulp Fiction star Peter Greene (who?) skulking around an apartment complex in a ski mask. Greene supposedly returned the next day to steal a license plate from a car in the complex's parking structure, and returned it after the complex's manager threatened to call the police. The tape is now available on the website.

Peter "Who?" Greene's potentially illegal exploits are not really anything I'm about to text my best friends about, but I see what Levin's shooting for. TMZ.com's broken a variety of stories that weren't necessarily time-sensitive, including Alec Baldwin's infamous rant against his 11-year-old daughter, Michael Richards' racist rant at an L.A. comedy club, and the details on Mel Gibson's anti-semitic rant in 2006. But will breaking big stories like this on their 6:30 pm show discourage viewers from checking out their website during the workday?

I doubt it. The people who punctuate every workday by refreshing TMZ.com to check out videos of drunken C-list celebs leaving Les Deux and to get up-to-the-minute information on Paris's jail sentence and Larry Birkhead's lawsuit (and bless their hearts for continuing to cover that story when everyone else has long since given up) will continue to do so, because watching video of Lauren Conrad re-applying her lipstick is still more interesting than your job. The question is will people watch the television show?

Twenty-five Fox affiliates ran the show, covering 41% of the U.S., and other assorted stations did as well, bringing TMZ into 98% of U.S. households. On most affiliates, it'll air right before established network shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, which already have loyal viewerships. While TMZ has some exclusive video, and every once in awhile they might break an exciting story, on most days, they'll be running essentially the same show as Access or Entertainment. TMZ is edgier and funnier than either of those network shows, but they're still on network TV, so they have to watch their step. In this writer's opinion, TMZ's got nothing on cable programs like VH1's Best Week Ever or E!'s The Daily 10. They've stated that their target demo with the TV show is males ages 18 to 35, an audience that'll probably be more drawn to the no-holds-barred cable programming.

Personally, my favorite part of Monday's broadcast was watching the clips of Harvey Levin and his staff, most of whom appear to be attractive men in his target demo, in their war room, pitching ideas for the website. "So Brad and Angelina's son, Maddox, started school ... we checked their lunch menu, just for kicks," says a staffer who could totally sexually harass me any day. "They serve things like cod and dijon-crusted pollack." Levin looks personally offended. "At the preschool?" His staffer confirms this. "I love that story," says Levin, who turns around to write it on the board as his total hottie of a staffer smiles at a job well done.

This should be the show. I'd watch this. The inner workings of a company like TMZ. We've got enough folks covering celebs. I want to watch the people watching the celebs. How do these stories get made? Who decides when and where to post what? Do they all look like the lunch menu guy? Please, TMZ, make this show.

As for TMZ the television show, it's perfectly good for what it's trying to be, but I probably won't watch it regularly. I don't spend much time watching Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight, either, because, like the rest of my generation, I get my news on the Internet or from Jon Stewart. You can rest assured that TMZ will be posting any big stories, time-sensitive or not, on its website after the show's aired. And anything really big will be on the blogs thirty seconds after it airs on TV. So there's no reason for me to watch this show. Will its target demographic feel differently?

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