I replay the car crash over and over in my brain. My favorite variation: Toby’s car bursts into flames and roasts him. Better than having a rabid anti-Oolfson jackal heading NASA security.
Or not. We’re planning to blast into space in a mothballed shuttle. People die even in well-maintained shuttles. Like it or otherwise, Ishwald stands between us and peril. Astronauts, too, dream of dandling grandkids. The Dream is stronger.
Astronauts don’t dwell on danger or we wouldn’t be astronauts. Somewhere along the line we beat our survival instinct into submission.
You already know how Channel Zilch started out. Admit it - you watched the show. Maybe you denied it to your hoity-toity friends, but you watched it. No one escapes the mindrot that is… Reality TV!
“Channel Zilch: The Astronette”. Seal four weirdoes in a big tin can and blast them into space. Bank on the usual voyeuristic appeal spiced by the novelty of space travel.
Titillation: Two hunky guys – one pretty boy and one ugly but compelling real man. Two gals – one hot and one Mom.
The usual T&A. Hel’s the T and Head’s the A. Not that Hel is top-heavy. Weightlessness does interesting things to T: no weight - no T sag; more even blood distribution - increased T volume. Some of the boys at NASA developed an equation for this phenomenon.
Intrigue: The thrill of watching people being people. Betrayal, benevolence, intrigue, alliance, tears, exaltation. Who slips tab A into slot B? Who slips knife A into back B? Who slips insult A into reputation B?
Ingredient D - We know but don’t talk about this crowd pleaser: Danger, Damage, Death. Snag the NASCAR and hockey and bridge-jumper crowd.
Infotainment. Awful word. Key ingredient to grabbing snobby viewers who wouldn’t stoop to watch Survivor or Danger Pit or Supermodel Slumber Party or whatever. Those people can claim they watch Channel Zilch because it’s a science documentary. Right.
Spice it up by calling it Channel Zilch, a pirate video station. Broadcast twenty four seven. Rake in the dough.
Chin’s the businessman with the business plan. He’s got the spreadsheets stuffed full of juicy numbers to prove it.
Manuel figures Zilch’ll suck in hundreds of millions a year from advertising, syndication, merchandizing, movie spin-offs, computer games, religions for all I know. Plenty of moola to buy our return trip to Earth before our bones turn to mush.
Despite the sure-fire concept Chin doesn’t even try strike a major network deal. Negotiating for a show about the space shuttle Enterprise isn’t the best way to keep our felonious caper mum. Prelaunch secrecy is a fine thing when you still have to steal a spaceship.
Some of you watched us on the Internet - streaming video in a jerky little window on your PC. Some of you waited until we got our cable deal and watched us on TV. But you watched us - even our abbreviated schedule scored heavy eyeball numbers.
And you bought this book to find out the real dirt behind the reality show. I’ll try to deliver the goods.
From tiny window on a computer to a full-bore media empire – Manuel Chin dreamed and planned it all.
What’ll make Channel Zilch especially sweet to advertisers is our huge nerd demographic. We got tech up the wazoo and space travel goes down well with the computer crowd.
Heloise is every geekboy’s moist dream. We figure we’ll own that 15-25 year old, largely male demographic. If you disregard the big slice of those hacker wannabe’s who live off pizza in their parents’ basements while downloading porn, that still leaves a huge swath of nerds with bank accounts.
So Zilch is going to sell the eyeballs of this juicy slice of the demographic spectrum to the ad industry. The ad guys will sell commercials, popup ads, product placements (I’ll gladly say any product’s name into the camera for $10,000. For $20,000 I’ll smile when I say it.) for hardware geegaws and brutal computer games and hemorrhoid ointments and Star Trek memorabilia and Japanese crap and phone sex. All the goodies to power the lifestyle of the voyeuristic computer user.
All we have to do is mix in a little commentary and space-tech yammer and bloopers into the video stream to keep Joe and Josephine Geek glued to their CRT’s so our advertisers can score their precious mind-share.
Hel showed us all a screensaver she called Zilch Pump that delivers jerky streaming CZ. She swore people would email it to one another, that Channel Zilch would spread like a virus through the Internet.
So what if none of our plans worked? We still grabbed Earth by the (eye)balls.
Chin wanted to call it Channel Zero, but when a trademark search turned up a cable porn channel with that name Heloise dubbed it Zilch, one of her pet expressions, and the name stuck.Like Chin told me once, “Customers are people with my money in their pockets.”
"Hel's Bet: The Book" by Doug Sharp