Fans eat up MTV ‘Stew’

First, suburban Philly skateboard pro Bam Margera and his crew dig a tunnel under his uncle’s house so they can saw through the floor and pop up in the fat man’s bedroom. Then Bam “borrows” his mom’s PT Cruiser and has it tricked out at the chop shop with body flames and boombox speakers. After casually asking his father’s favorite color, Bam paints the family’s entire kitchen electric blue, right down to the toaster, silverware and food in the fridge. Then he paints his dad.

And for the grand finale, Bam’s pals shove dad Phil and uncle Don Vito into the makeshift backyard equivalent of a steel-cage wrestling ring, to be pelted with a deluge of increasingly gross debris -- cornflakes and honey, bacon and anchovies, even crickets and maggots.

That’s just one televised half-hour of living la vida Bam.

And male teens across the nation are insanely down with that.

Margera, the 24-year-old “Jackass” co-conspirator, has quickly become the main attraction of one of the few places you can actually find the hard-to-reach young male demographic glued to TV sets for something other than video games or sports.

“Viva La Bam” is the fast-rising centerpiece of MTV’s adrenaline-stoked “Sunday Stew” block of reality series. While the broadcast networks loudly blamed Nielsen methodology last fall when their male youth viewing numbers fell off a cliff, “Sunday Stew” was cutting a buzz saw through those same ratings.

The two-hour concept succeeded with such fury after its Oct. 26 debut -- “Bam” topped its time period the rest of 2003 among teens, beating even the broadcast networks and NFL football -- that the lineup is returning to MTV this Sunday for an entirely new season of raunchy, bleep-you mayhem.

And Bam, who kicks things off at 9 p.m., is actually the well-behaved one. In 10:30’s “Wildboyz,” “Jackass” lug nuts Chris Pontius and Steve-O take us on globetrotting nature safaris where they turn the notion of the “Ugly American” into the “Idiot American.” In Africa, Australia or Florida, they romp around snickering in loincloths, make out with giraffes and eat animal excrement.

MTV’s weekly “Stew” includes two other shows -- “Punk’d” (10 p.m.), with hidden-camera celebrity “gotchas” from Ashton Kutcher, and “Pimp My Ride” (9:30 p.m.), the cool car makeover show -- both hits in their own right. Both regularly land in Nielsen’s weekly cable Top 10 among viewers 18 to 34, and even edge into the overall youth Top 30 alongside broadcast hits like “American Idol.” But these two “Stew” shows are essentially, well, normal. Mischievous, yes, but hardly offensive.

Not so the raging testosterone behind “Bam” and “Boyz.” Adults can find themselves appalled by the shows’ extreme derring-do, gross-outs and steady stream of bleeped expletives.

And then there’s what some view as the apparent glorification of asinine acts that the less discerning among the stars’ youthful peers might be tempted to imitate. (“Don’t try this” advisories appear before each episode and at commercial breaks, and even on the shows’ www.mtv.com websites.) To more mature eyes, it may all seem an infantile and possibly toxic assault on civilized society.

But that’s exactly the point.

“I know a lot of parents don’t want their kids watching it,” says Brad Adgate, director of research at the ad consulting firm Horizon Media and author of the detailed report “Everybody’s Favorite Target -- The 18-34 Demographic.” “Looking at myself, if I was a teenage kid, and my mother says, ‘You can’t look at this’ -- c’mon, that’s all the more reason.”

The “Stew” shows purposely reflect “a sensibility that’s very rebellious,” says Brian Graden, MTV’s president of entertainment, who has programmed that channel for seven years. “If there’s something we know about programming to teenage boys in particular, it’s that you have to create something very much about their sensibility and, in a way, no one else’s.”

Graden likens these viewers to a “smart mob, gravitating from one show to another channel’s show, almost sort of instantly and completely, maneuvering the television dial like they maneuver video games.

“This is the first generation, if you think about it, that grew up with all media under their control. They were never without the Internet. Never without DVDs. They’re used to the notion that they control all media, and they get what they want, when they want it.”

These man-boys “are looking for a very tough kind of television,” says Indiana University’s Jon Kraszewski, who teaches a class called “MTV Nations, MTV Aesthetics, MTV Cultures,” which examines “how MTV fits into the cultural dialogue.”

Kraszewski says that’s why the Wildboyz’s wanton romps and Bam’s credits resonate with these guys. They’re the latest boundary pushers in a long line of MTV pranksters and mischief makers, from the daredevilry of “Kevin Seal: Sporting Fool” (1990) to those dimwitted cartoon dudes “Beavis and Butt-head” (1993) to parent pest Tom Green’s antics (1997).

In 2000, MTV uncorked what then seemed like the ultimate in abusive acting-out: “Jackass,” whence the “Stew” stars sprung. Bam began pranking parents Phil and April Margera there, while “Wildboyz” Chris and Steve-O joined host Johnny Knoxville and other guys of the title persuasion in such foolhardy stunts as wearing a “meat suit” over a hot grill or swallowing fish and vomiting them back up.

“Jackass” and Green (along with MTV’s top-rated wrestling roundup “Sunday Night Heat”) had begun staking out territory on television’s most-watched night. As male-appeal competitors like “The X-Files” left the air and Fox’s “Simpsons”-to-”Malcolm” comedies started to age, Graden felt Sunday night “presented itself as a pretty good opportunity” for an entire appointment block to lure that golden demographic.

“Advertisers pay a premium to reach that young viewer,” explains analyst Adgate, “because, one, they don’t watch a lot of television, and two, [sponsors] think they’re a lot more likely to buy a certain product category or to build brand loyalty because these people are going to be buying products for the next 50 years. And there is a limited supply of shows that can effectively target that group.”

What do they like to watch? If you extrapolate from their MTV favorites -- and other young male TV top draws like Comedy Central’s “South Park” -- the answer seems to be shows that run wild, take risks, trash traditions, test the censors and generally tick off (that’s the polite euphemism) mainstream society.

The networks, seeking as broad an audience as possible, can’t touch that kind of content. And who says they’d know how to? They’re only starting to attract younger viewers with reality programs, while MTV has been running them successfully since the 1992 debut of “The Real World,” still running in its 14th incarnation.

Today’s youth “came of age in the ‘90s,” says MTV’s Graden, “when Monica was entertainment, when O.J. was entertainment, when people parading across the stage on Oprah was entertainment. Their dramatic inputs and their comedic inputs come from real life.”

“Bam” and other “Stew” shows also draw a sizable female audience, Graden notes. “The truth of the math is, even though these shows have a boys’ sensibility, you can’t get a big enough [ratings] number unless you drag along the girls. It’s much closer to a 55-45 split” of male-to-female viewers than might be expected, he says.