With Its Boy-Band Satire, MTV Is Making Movies

Not many brand-new, unknown music acts get to launch their careers on MTV’s hit-making “Total Request Live,” with Carson Daly hyping them and teenage girls cheering.

That was the case with 2Gether, however, which appeared on the show a few weeks ago to debut its video for “U+Me=Us (Calculus).”

The “TRL” gig was all part of MTV’s decision to start making movies. The girls were applauding on cue. They’d never heard of the group, which is understandable since 2Gether doesn’t really exist. The guys are actors, and their “group” is a fabrication, capitalizing on the current “boy band” craze of the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync that rules MTV and teen pop culture.

2Gether was created for MTV, and by MTV--to star in the cable music channel’s first made-for-TV movie, “2Gether,” which premieres tonight.

OK, all you ‘60s kids sing along:

Hey, hey we’re 2Gether . . .

Well, yes, 2Gether sort of is the Monkees of the boy-band age. But where “The Monkees” was a TV homage to/rip-off of the Beatles, “2Gether” is a satire, what “This Is Spinal Tap” was to ‘80s heavy metal.

The film has all the elements: Music business veteran Bob Buss (Alan Blumenfeld) is dumped by his big creation, the hot boy band Whoa!, and goes on a mission to create another one. So confident is he that he books a concert and has just seven days to find the talent and build the act.

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Off he goes to find five guys who fit the mold for boy-band success--the hunk, the doe-eyed cutie, the rebel, the shy guy and the reassuring older-brother type. He writes their songs, designs their outfits, develops their dance routines, teaches them how to answer questions about their favorite colors and how to dodge teddy bears tossed on stage, all the while dealing with inevitable conflicts.

Given that the real boy bands are, in fact, creations of such mentors, isn’t this just a bit too easy to satire?

“You have a challenge with something that’s screaming satire like a boy band,” says Evan Farmer, who plays the role of the hunk, Jerry. “Something so campish has a propensity to be done really poorly, but I think we took that challenge and set the bar high.”

Farmer has some real experience to draw on. In 1997, before the Backstreet Boys’ success had crossed from Europe to America, he was hired to join Na-Na, a boy band that was huge in Russia and wanted to take its act to the West--though the collapse of a business deal ended that dream.

“2Gether” director Nigel Dick also knows a lot about the milieu. Making his feature debut, Dick already is a boy-band style-setter, having directed the Backstreet Boys’ breakthrough videos and having worked with ‘N Sync, as well as teen phenom Britney Spears.

To him, though, the trick was not to view this as satire, but a variation on a time-tested formula.

“I felt it really was a story about dreams and aspirations which are important to kids of any era, and [doing a satire] just for the sake of it wasn’t something I was prepared to spend six months of my life doing,” he says.

“The more I looked at it, I was doing a war movie, a ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ where you’d take five guys for your platoon and have the older-brother type, the guy who thought he’d look macho with a machine gun, the one who looks frightened and so on,” he says. “So without being pompous about it, our little story had some universal values, really.”

Fine, but of course the movie takes it to comedic extremes. For example, the older-brother character here really is the older brother of one of the other characters--a bald, tubby guy who’s divorced with two daughters, played by Kevin Farley (in real life, younger brother of the late comic Chris Farley).

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The satire works best, arguably, in the songs, crafted by people who, like Dick, are veterans of the genre. “U+Me=Us,” “Say It (Don’t Spray It)” and “You’re My Baby Girl,” using such boy-band veteran writers and producers as Veit Renn (who’s worked with Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync) and KNS Productions, stand boy-band pop confection cliches on their ears, as Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom” and “Hell Hole” did to their world. There are the sugary melodies, sickening sentimentalities, the gratuitous rapping by the rebel figure--and some very absurd lyrics (“I don’t understand you/you’re like reading a great big book in Hebrew,” begins “Say It”).

If this sounds like MTV biting the hand that currently feeds it, Brian Graden, the channel’s president of programming, says that’s part of the idea.

“MTV can ride each passing phase. But if we wed ourselves too closely to any one phenomenon, then we’re not about the audience, but about the phenomenon. And that never works,” says Graden. “Back in the hair-band days in the ‘80s, MTV was both celebrating and sending them up at the same time. And more recently, ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ was trashing our own videos.”

It’s also an easy entry for MTV as it launches into the world of made-for-TV movie production. This is the first of what is planned to be about four films a year. In development now are “Jailbait,” based on a true story of an 18-year-old high school senior jailed for having sex with his sophomore girlfriend, and another about the murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard.

2Gether, as it turns out, is already having an impact even before tonight’s first showing of the movie about the band. After 2Gether’s debut on “TRL,” “U+Me” started being requested on the show’s daily voting. When the band made its second “TRL” appearance last week, the audience didn’t have to be coached to cheer.

Now there’s even talk of more videos, perhaps a sequel, or a “2Gether” series. Maybe they will be the Monkees of the ‘00s.

* “2Gether” can be seen on MTV tonight at 8. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for coarse language).