Fox Network’s Chao Rose, Fell on Outrageous Acts : Business: TV executive’s unconventional style helped boost ratings. But some saw a professional death wish.

If anyone personified Tabloid TV, it was Stephen Chao.

Chao had a history of thumbing his nose at convention. The former National Enquirer reporter was the chief architect of such Fox Network shows as “Cops” and “Studs,” which stretched the limits of taste in television. The shows helped turn Fox into a challenger to the big three networks, and established Chao, 36, as a programming boy wonder.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox, was so impressed that he promoted Chao to president of Fox Television Stations and Fox News Service just eight weeks ago. It was a meteoric rise, even by go-go television standards.

But Chao finally started to shock even Fox. In a highly controversial move at Fox, he put rapper Ice-T, who is known for his incendiary rhetoric, on the air during the Los Angeles riots. Then, last weekend, Chao hired a male model to strip at a company management conference in Aspen, Colo., that was attended by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and other dignitaries.

Chao said the demonstration was designed to point up the problems of free speech and inequities in television. But the move so outraged Murdoch that he fired Chao on the spot.

It was ironic that the progenitor of tabloid TV should fall victim to the very kind of outrageous acts that made him a rising star in the television industry and Murdoch’s media empire. Oddly, Chao’s gesture was aimed at showing the banality of society’s strictures.

Chao, who had studied classics at Harvard University and was descended from one of the wealthiest families in pre-revolutionary China, felt that many Americans had become disenfranchised. Television should change that, he believed.

“I was questioning the conventions which govern TV in America, which are confused and hypocritical--such things as the difference between nakedness and lewdness or the predominance of violence in fictional programming,” Chao said Monday.

Although some saw the incident as the real-life equivalent of the anything-goes television world dramatized in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 satiric film “Network,” Chao insists that the brazen demonstration--the male model disrobed only a few feet from Cheney--was not a publicity stunt.

“I was definitely trying to be provocative, but I didn’t think this would be the consequence,” Chao said of his firing. “I have no animus toward Rupert at all.”

Murdoch, however, was enraged at the surprise demonstration orchestrated by Chao. The media baron, whose habit of publishing pictures of bare-breasted women in his British tabloids masks his fundamental conservatism and strict moral code, was all the more angered because he felt that a trustworthy lieutenant had publicly betrayed and hurt him.

“Stephen Chao, my friend and colleague, made a tremendous misjudgment,” Murdoch told Fox affiliates in Los Angeles on Monday for their annual meeting. “Steve was one of the most brilliant young executives we have ever had, and it was a tragedy to see the beginnings of a great career self-destruct. But I hope we have learned from it. Our lives will go, so I will say no more.”

Stories about Chao thumbing his nose at convention were legend at Fox.

He once walked out of a staff meeting in front of uncomprehending executives after then-Fox Chairman Barry Diller criticized him for not wearing a tie.

Another time, when Chao finally agreed to sign his employment contract after a long delay, wherever the word employee appeared he crossed it out and wrote indentured servant and sent it back to the Fox legal department.

At other times, producers watched incredulously as he sometimes dozed off in pitch meetings. A phony soiled diaper and pile of fake excrement decorated his office.

Some Fox executives saw in Chao a professional death wish, which was nearly fulfilled the time he called Diller a liar during a heated argument one night.

Diller has a reputation for intimidating even the most self-assured executives. Chao’s accusation so outraged him that he grabbed a videotape off Chao’s desk and hurled it at the young programmer. Chao ducked, and the tape dented the plasterboard wall behind him. Diller stormed out. Chao had the videotape framed and hung on the wall to cover the hole.

“Barry is not one of those people who invite obsequious behavior,” said Chao, refusing to discuss the incident. But the story vividly illustrated Chao’s insouciance. Others called it arrogance. Either way, Chao eschewed the customary rules of Hollywood’s tribal etiquette.

Since Diller exited his throne at Fox last February, Chao had been handed two quick promotions by new Fox Chairman Murdoch--a move that some Fox executives thought was too much too soon. Chao was given charge of the fledgling Fox News Service, the fourth network’s effort to create a news division, and Fox Television Stations, the seven stations the studio owns.

Chao’s elevation sent a signal to journalistic puritans that Fox’s news programming would reflect the kind of elements found in “Studs,” a game show peppered with sexual double-entendre that pairs off good-looking moussed and mini-skirted couples, or “America’s Most Wanted,” which seeks to nab criminals by re-creating their lurid crimes.

After duly noting that Chao’s appointment to head news just may invigorate the insular and smug world of TV journalism, the trade paper Daily Variety fretted: “Then again, those who see it as a sign that the nation is going to hell in a handbasket could be right, too.”

Such speculation did not faze Chao, who heard it hundreds of times before from the Establishment critics who dismissed his shows as cheesy productions designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

But Chao had his defenders.

“Steven caused me to rethink TV more than anybody else I knew,” said Michael Linder, creator of “America’s Most Wanted.” Chao’s “way of looking at TV as though he had just arrived from Mars was very challenging. He created a more visceral kind of video than had ever been on the screen before.”

But in television--where instant commercial success is the only respected measure of achievement--Chao’s shows have been a gold mine. “Studs” costs a paltry $50,000 a week to produce--a fraction of most shows--and will earn $20 million in profits this year and $60 million next year.

Chao’s dismissal is a swift blow for Murdoch’s aggressive expansion plans for the Fox network. The network wants to expand to seven nights of programming by next year and create a signature newscast that could be used by its affiliates.

Chao’s specific orders were to use Fox’s owned stations and affiliates as the backbone for the news service, an idea the major networks have never been able to carry out because of institutional problems dating to their formation.

Indeed, no one questioned Chao’s abilities. But the reputation for brilliance also came with some baggage. Chao was widely feared within the cloistered and gossipy fraternity of TV journalists to be aggressively pro-tabloid, as evidenced by the shows with which his name is associated.

He also, in the relatively short period of time since being promoted, managed to alienate several employees under his charge. When one longtime Fox executive asked what his future would be in the new regime, Chao decisively and coldly replied: “None.”

Yet if any lesson might be drawn from the Chao affair it may be that there are limits even at Fox, the network that many critics think elevated raunch, sex and crime to a new pantheon in American culture.

The network that defined itself with such shows as “Married With Children” and “Cops” is slowing becoming the network of “Beverly Hills 90210” and its spinoff, “Melrose Place,” two shows that are about the fantasylike lives of super-rich kids rather than the gritty and sometime humorous realities of a more mundane existence.

Times staff writer Daniel Cerone contributed to this story.