Cheaters scores in latenight

June 2024 · 6 minute read

No major companies buying airtime, revenues low

It’s what Bob Thompson, head of media studies at Syracuse U., calls “the dirty little secret of TV syndication.”

Now that’s saying something.

The series is called “Cheaters,” and its premise is that the show’s producers will hire private detectives, available 24 hours a day, to put a tail on people suspected of cheating on their mates.

During the first part of the show, aggrieved parties talk on camera about their relationships, confiding to the host Joey Greco the reasons why they think their bedmates might be fooling around with someone else.

Viewers then see the gumshoes go about their surveillance to come up with proof — on grainy videotape — that cheating is going on.

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When the cheater finally gets spotted, the show builds to the big climax: a confrontation of the betrayer by the betrayed, recorded in all of its drama by the “Cheaters” cameras.

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Screaming and grappling usually take place during the ambush, making the scene look like a remote-location shoot for one of the more raucous “Jerry Springer Show” slugfests.

“We go for the bottom-feeders,” says Bobby Goldstein, executive producer of “Cheaters.”

Upper-income people don’t need a TV show if they think their spouses are being unfaithful, he adds: They can afford to hire their own private detectives.

Also, it’s easier for Goldstein to get waivers from “younger, lower-income, blue-collar people” to use their images on the show, says Cord Douglas, whose company Cinemour distributes “Cheaters” outside the U.S.

While women are still in the majority, Goldstein says more men are coming to the show to check up on their wives, girlfriends or male lovers.

But before Goldstein takes on their cases, Douglas says, they have to agree to allow the producers to use the taped material in any way they see fit.

Douglas says the show also gets just about all of the cheaters to sign a waiver by offering them an inducement of between $500 and $2,000, which — to a low-wage earner — can help to ease the humiliation of coming off as a rat in national syndication. For holdouts to Goldstein’s offer, the show has to electronically fuzz out the cheater’s image.

Sleaze sells

Despite the “sleazy content” of “Cheaters,” as Thompson puts it, domestic distrib MG/Perin has cleared the show in 151 markets reaching 72.6% of the U.S., including Tribune-owned stations in Los Angeles (KTLA), Chicago (WGN), Dallas (KDAF) and Atlanta (WATL).

And while “Cheaters” often runs in latenight time periods when most TV viewers are sound asleep, the show pulls a respectable household rating. During the November sweeps, it harvested a surprisingly robust 1.4 rating among women 18-34.

Richard Perin, president of MG/Perin, says no mainstream advertisers will buy time on the show. That reluctance delivers a damaging blow to “Cheaters” because its sole source of revenue in the U.S. is advertisers: The stations don’t pay a penny in license fees.

“My clients would regard the show as inappropriate,” says Bob Flood, executive VP/director of national electronic media for Optimedia Intl. “The commercial environment is just not right.”

John Rash, senior VP and director of broadcast negotiations for Campbell Mithun Esty, says, “The content is not acceptable, unless an advertiser is trying to court controversy.”

Since the usual advertisers have taken a pass, Perin says his barter-sales agent, Mediacast, sells time on “Cheaters” to direct-response marketers, the companies that ask viewers to send in for everything from an exercise machine to an application for an online computer school.

The revenues from these ads come to only a fraction of what a blue-chip advertiser would pony up to direct its message to a guaranteed number of young women. Perin hopes to get extra money from direct response in 2004-05 by clearing a half-hour strip culled from the reruns of the first 82 hours produced through May.

These repeats would run concurrent with the original weekend hours. Mediacast would offer advertisers time in both versions of “Cheaters.”

“Cheaters” has never turned a profit, says Goldstein, who owns the show and takes a producer’s fee to provide for his family, which includes three kids.

The show costs a bare-bones $60,000 an hour to produce. But Goldstein says he has to pay for extras like the cost of satellite feeds and subscriptions to Nielsen ratings.

But if the stations that take the weekly hour also agree to take the rerun strip, “Our ad rates will go up next season,” he says.

“I don’t get despondent — I’m like Rocky Balboa,” he concludes. “No matter how terrible the bloodbath, I refuse to get knocked out of the ring.”

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