Sam Pang: Asking the Tough Questions

Hey, Sam Pang Tonight is back. Also back: many of the elements that made the first season such a fun watch. Which makes sense, even to us. If the show’s good enough to bring back, why would you mess around with it? Especially when all you need to do is make one change to turn it into exactly what the network needs.

No, not the set.

Okay, maybe we need to provide some context. More than most commercial networks, Ten has always been the place celebrities turn to when they want to flog their latest project. Until this very year there’s been an unbroken line of Roving Enterprises productions stretching back decades built around providing venues for celebrity chat. What, you thought The Project stayed on air because of the news?

There’s a big market for celebrity chat out there. Amongst viewers, not so much. But there’s a large and somewhat powerful PR industry that demands outlets where their clients can come on and talk about whatever it is they have to sell. If you have a movie star on your talk show, chances are that during the ad breaks there’ll be ads for their movies, which brings in the cash. And you know, in theory viewers like celebrity interviews too.

Seven and Nine have breakfast shows for this kind of thing. There’s also various news-ish shows that can handle a bit of celebrity chit-chat. The ABC does a surprising amount of this as well. Stars are often popping up on 730 or their breakfast show to talk up stuff. Australian Story is happy to have a star on, so long as they’ve been battling some serious illness or drama so the episode looks like more than just an infomercial.

Thing is, none of these shows are what you’d call the home of light entertainment. Ten, on the other hand, does make light entertainment, which is exactly where the big stars feel right at home. One hitch: most of Ten’s light entertainment, stretching back to the 20th century, has been made by Working Dog.

The WD team aren’t big fans of discussing their working methods. So it’s hard to know exactly why they’re not big fans of having on big stars. We do know that publicists have been complaining about it since the days of The Panel. And their approach to interviews has remained the same for well over two decades: they like sports people, their mates, comedy types, and fresh faces. The usual jaded types flogging their latest TV series or album? Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

When The Project was on the air and chatting to everyone under the sun, it didn’t matter that Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Cheap Seats were focused more on guests who’d be entertaining than guests who had something to flog. It was a win-win: The Project pulled the big names that audiences might tune in for, the WD shows got to be decent shows. And then it turned out the audiences weren’t tuning into The Project for big names, or much of anything else.

The first season of Sam Pang Live was, unsurprisingly, not big on big name guests. Maybe they didn’t want to jump on board a ship that was probably sinking. Maybe the so-so results of Jack Thompson’s appearence in episode one made the producers decide that more casual, entertaining guests were the way to go.

Either way, it led to one of the first season’s big strengths. Rather than having to sit through some vibe-killing slog with a high profile stiff, the chats were, for want of a better word, fun. Pang spoke almost entirely to comedians. The guest announcers? Also comedians. In something of a shock twist for Australian television, it turned out that stuffing a show full of comedians resulted in a funny show.

Having absolutely no idea how commercial television works, we have no clue if someone high up at Ten thought “if Sam Pang Tonight works we don’t need The Project for celebrity interviews, and without celebrity interviews we don’t need The Project“. What we do know is that Sam Pang Tonight was given a second season halfway through its first, and The Project was axed not long after Sam Pang’s first season finished.

This week on Sam Pang Tonight his special guests are Russell Crowe and Rachel Griffiths.