The latest in reality TV: playing God to Todd

Americans have already picked a couple American Idols, kicked out pests from the Big Brother house and tuned in as love sizzled and fizzled on TV’s ever-expanding reality universe. Starting tonight, viewers will be asked to become even more involved in what’s on TV: managing someone’s life.

For the next seven weeks, FX’s “Todd TV” will follow 30-year-old slacker Todd Santos as he goes about his life in Hermosa Beach in search of answers to life’s mysteries. Those will come from viewers, who will vote on decisions Santos faces and e-mail suggestions for turns his life should take, whether it’s ordering him to take a music class, apply for a job, commit to a long-term relationship or budget his $5,000 weekly stipend. Santos’ contract stipulates he must carry out the audience’s wishes no matter what he thinks or feels, said Tom Forman, the show’s co-executive producer.

These “Truman Show” meets “The Manchurian Candidate” aspects put “Todd TV” at the forefront of the latest wave in reality shows, most of them on cable, launching over the next few months. These shows offer original twists on established unscripted formats and, in some cases, push the limits of reality programming with unfathomable premises and fresh concepts. Audiences already got a taste of this new out-there form of programming with Monday’s premiere of the extreme romance show “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance.”

Also coming soon are TLC’s “Now Who’s Boss?” series and A&E;’s “Dearly Departed.” “Boss” ups the ante on NBC’s “The Apprentice” by having powerful CEOs trade places with employees in the lower ranks, focusing on firms such as the Loews Hotels chain and California Pizza Kitchen franchise. Meanwhile, in a reality interpretation of HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” “Dearly Departed” will chronicle the daily operation of a family-run funeral home in San Diego County.

Those are the tame offerings. On the titillating side, the Sci Fi Channel debuts its second-ever reality show in March, one that makes the stars of the WB’s “Surreal Life” look like neighbors of Ward and June Cleaver. “Mad Mad House” tests the tolerance of 10 so-called “conventional” guests who co-exist in a mansion with five “genuine practitioners of alternative lifestyles”: The five “Alts,” as the five hosts are known, are a Wiccan, a voodoo priestess, a naturist, a vampire and a modern primitive. These five subject the guests to mental and physical trials, such as diving for items in a bloodbath.

Even pay-per-view is cashing in on the action with this month’s debut of its X-rated talent competition, “Can You Be a Porn Star?” “I’m not surprised at all that it’s gotten to this level,” said Ted Mandell, a film and video production professor at the University of Notre Dame. “TV and film will push the envelope until something horrific happens or a scandal pops up. The production costs for reality shows are too cheap to shut off the faucet before a scandal hits.”

Although the genre is still relatively young, producers and network executives have been scrambling to create formats that feel distinct and original, said Mark Andrejevic, assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa and author of “Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched.”

“One of the things that has happened rather quickly is that the formats became formulaic and the authenticity of the people in the show came into question,” Andrejevic said. “So if you’re promising authentic reality, the trick is to put people in situations that, even if they want to control their portrayal, it becomes harder and harder to do. You’re squeezing a little bit of authenticity out of a format that is becoming just as formulaic as the format it promised to replace.”

For cable networks, developing reality programming is no different than creating scripted shows, said Mark Stern, executive vice president of original programming for the Sci Fi Channel. “It’s not about being extreme or about being different,” he said. “The job of cable, if we want to survive in the marketplace, is that we have to think outside the box.”

Which is exactly how it occurred to Peter Liguori, president of FX Networks, that somewhere in America is a person willing to give up his willpower for a chance to be on television. As it turned out, there were 10,000.

“When broadcast television went to the extreme with reality programming, the networks became difficult to out-gross, like ‘Fear Factor,’ or out-sex, like ‘Paradise Hotel,’ or out-prize, like ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,’ ” he said. “So the only thing cable can do is outsmart When we’re looking at reality TV and seeing people turning their lives over to who they’re going to marry, who they’re going to date, what body part of a horse they’re going to be eating, we decided that, ultimately, someone will give up their free will to be on television.”

FX’s search for that attractive, young person who needed direction in life -- and would be willing to rely on the public for it -- began with an ad campaign that yielded 10,000 applications and a recruitment drive that led to Santos, who was hanging out on Hermosa Beach. Of those applicants, 600 were interviewed. Once Santos and the other finalist were selected, producers followed them for several days and both men underwent psychological tests.

They finally settled on Santos, who is purported to be in a world-class rut. He lives on the Strand with three roommates and dreams of playing the guitar in his own band. But he is so unmotivated that he rarely wakes up before 4 p.m., according to the show’s producers. Santos agreed to turn his life over to FX Networks -- and the public -- because “I believe America has a better head on its shoulder than I do,” as he says in a promo for the cable network’s first unscripted show. “He may not really like it but this is really about building a better Todd,” Forman said. “This is not about torturing him, or making him eat bugs or stranding him on an island. Todd has potential that we all saw. He’s not a complete .... But he flat out says that he doesn’t know how to make decisions. In every aspect of his life, he’s just kind of cruising.”

Both FX and Endemol USA have refused to make Santos available for an interview, saying that “he’s not media savvy” and needs to be “insulated.” Even last week, after taping for the first episode had begun, Forman said that Todd “is beyond nervous. He is terrified that he is really going to be followed every day and that while he is sleeping somebody will be waiting on the couch for him to get up. He’s scared about what America will tell him. What if they tell him he doesn’t have talent?”

One person who is not worried about him is his father, David Santos, who lives in Winthrop, Mass., and says it is surreal to see his son on the “Todd TV” promos. Santos, who has a younger sister, grew up in Marlboro, Mass., and graduated from Westfield State University, where he majored in communication. After college, Santos moved to Cape Cod and Vail, Colo., before settling in Los Angeles three years ago “to do something with his career in songwriting and starting a band,” his father said.

Asked if the network’s descriptions of Todd as unmotivated and in a “rut” are fair, his unemployed father quipped: “That sounds like his father. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, you know what I mean?”

By letting America -- and not the producers -- decide Santos’ fate, “Todd TV” stands on the cusp of an interactive trend that could make couch potatoes extinct, Andrejevic said.

“ ‘Todd TV’ anticipates the kind of conversion that creates a kind of video game/television show,” he said. “The remote control will turn into a joystick. Viewers get to control the person on the screen. The significance will be to see whether viewers are willing to take on that much of the work of making the show interesting.”

On “Mad Mad House,” the lifestyle of the Alts proved interesting enough for the 10-week series. Producers Arthur Smith and Kent Weed, who also created “Paradise Hotel” for Fox, interviewed nearly 200 people over six months for the five starring roles. In the end, the five Alts said the best part of the show was having a platform for presenting their subcultures to mainstream America.

“On the surface, yes, it looks like five assembled freaks ... but the show is so much more than that,” said Fiona Horne, the Wiccan (who once upon a time were referred to as witches), speaking on Jan. 7 to a gathering of reporters at the industry’s midseason press tour in Hollywood. “It was not only a mental, physical and emotional challenge but also very much a spiritual challenge. And one of the most rewarding things was that it showed that even in the most profound diversity, people can live together. People have things in common. And there was a lot of love.”

All of the shows will succeed if they are based on intriguing characters that can hold viewers’ attention week after week, Mandell said.

“It’s never about the premise with these reality shows,” he said. “We all know reality shows are far from reality. They’re unscripted but they’re not too different from dramas and sitcoms in that if there is no intriguing character to follow, it has a pretty short shelf life.”

But high ratings will not mark the success of “Todd TV,” Forman said. “We will fail if we don’t leave Todd better than when we found him.”

Which leaves David Santos laughing in New England, before he’s even seen the first episode.

“The American public is supposed to know what my son is supposed to do?” he said. “The American public doesn’t even know what it wants to do.”