Sex, Money & Videotape

摘要

Civilization might have been better served if, on that fateful evening in 1997, John de Mol had just called it a night and gone to sleep. But he couldn't stop brooding about television. It was close to midnight, at the end of a long and fruitless brainstorming session, when someone had mentioned Biosphere 2―the American media stunt that locked four men and four women in a giant glass bubble in the desert for two years. At 5 a.m. the next morning, De Mol had his inspiration. "I was hypnotized," recalls the handsome Dutchman, 47. He runs a TV production company called Endemol (the pharmaceutical-sounding name comes from the 1994 merger with a Netherlands rival, Joop van den Ende; see box, p. 33). "I suddenly started wondering what would happen if you put a bunch of boys and girls together in a house and put them on television 24 hours a day." He can't claim to have invented the idea; MTV's Real World was already on the air. But he milked it better. After a year of secret work De Mol created a show called Big Brother, in which 24 TV cam-eras were trained on a group of young, good-looking men and women cooped up in a house for 100 days. Aired in Holland in September 1999, it arrived just when the world was ready for a new land of boob-tube content reality TV. Love it or loathe it, this kind of show has fun-damentally changed how television operates―and has made John de Mol a very rich guy.