Quote:War's Not hell, It's Entertainment!
Friday February 22 7:56 PM ET

Suddenly this whole reality TV thing is getting too real.


Deciding there's nothing quite as entertaining as warfare, ABC has just announced a new unscripted prime-time show called Profiles from the Front Line that producers say will give viewers an inside look at the war on terrorism. The show is expected to debut later this year.

Masterminded by explosion-meister Jerry Bruckheimer and Cops creator Bertram van Munster, Profiles will follow our courageous men and women in uniform for 13 weeks as they travel to global hot spots and take on would-be bin Ladens.

"We want to go into their lives in real time and follow specific people," van Munster tells Daily Variety. "We will cast our cast of characters from all levels of the military. It is a reality show. It has to be entertaining, dramatic, and the characters have to be appropriate."

Bruckheimer says the show will be "saluting our military" and be very patriotic in tone while transporting viewers close to the action to relate the experiences of soldiers on the battlefield.

The producer of such flag-waving flicks as Top Gun, Pearl Harbor and the current war drama Black Hawk Down (all in cooperation with the military) apparently had no difficulty convincing top brass at the Pentagon and the Defense Department to sign off on the project. Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney also gave their thumbs-up.

"There's a lot of other ways to convey information to the American people than through news organizations," Rear Admiral Craig Quigley explains in the New York Times. "That's the principal means. But if there is an opportunity to tell about the professionalism of our men and women in uniform on prime time television for 13 straight weeks, we're going to do it. That's an opportunity not to be missed."

Bruckheimer and van Muster's camera crews will have unfettered access to soldiers "trooping around all over the countryside--flying on planes, going on ships, [or] going on patrol with the 101st Airborne, [and] living a rugged life," Quigley says.

If the war-as-entertainment aspect wasn't controversial enough, the Pentagon will also screen all footage before it hits airwaves.

And that's deeply disturbing to media watchdogs like Robert Thomas of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television, who have launched a counter-offensive, accusing the network of being a propaganda arm for the Pentagon and keeping legitimate journalists on the sidelines.

"You have a bunch of journalists who should be covering this kind of material who are being denied access to it," Thomas tells Reuters. "Then you've got this entertainment operation who, as part of the new alliance between Hollywood and the government, are presumably being given access because the nature of their portrayal of the front line has already been...approved by those granting the access."

Hollywood has cozied up to the White House in the wake of September 11, even forming a joint committee to figure out ways the entertainment industry could aid the war effort.

Not only will Profiles rely on video provided by the Pentagon, van Munster has said producers won't share any footage that may be newsworthy with other news organizations--even ABC News.

Attempting to deflect the building criticism, Andrea Wong, ABC Entertainment's senior vice president of alternative series and specials, denies that the military will have control in the content of the show, arguing that the network has the final say and would only edit out footage endangering the security of the troops.

And even though Profiles is drawing fire, there's already another similar project in the works. Daily Variety reports that VH1 has tapped documentary producer R.J. Cutler (The War Room) for its own war-based reality show that will tell the stories of Operation Enduring Freedom military personnel through video diaires.

The network has already recruited 90 soldiers, given them each video cameras and ordered them to record their day-to-day activities for the benefit of American audiences back home.

Cutler will edit the thousands of hours of tape down to 13 half-hour episodes, which will air sometime this summer.

Viewers jonesing for war entertainment now can already tune in to USA Network's Combat Missions, where contestants take part in simulated warfare. And CBS is planning to air its own military-based reality series, American Fighter Pilots, starting next month. Neither of those shows is Pentagon-approved, however.