Interview: Andy Nehl, Project Next

Photo credit: Phil Rogers

Words by Jonnn Li

From the producer of The Chaser’s War on Everything, comes a project brimming with candour; an organic production that threatens to challenge the superstructure of the television industry. Enter Project Next a reality show where the contestants produce the show itself.

After The Chaser achieved infamy for all the right reasons, series producer Andy Nehl is now teaming up with broadcast veteran Andrew Denton to produce something that has never been attempted before.

The dilemma is this: “The TV industry is a hard industry to break into, because you need to know people,” says Nehl. “All the people you work with are people you already know.” This all makes for an industry that can be just a bit too predictable.

The solution therefore, is to find some fresh meat: drag in a handful of talented strangers from the street, give them a 30-minute timeslot, and see what happens.

“The show may be raw and messy, but we hope the contestants will have room to fail“

Of course, such an offer of a meteoric rise into television fame is an attractive option, and the quality and quantity of the talent was fittingly stellar. “We had 1,100-1,200 on-time applications,” says Nehl, “and we got a few hundred late applications, but they failed the first test in the TV world.”

What kind of people were they looking for? “Anyone with an 18-35 year-old attitude,” he says. “We’re not ageist… we just wanted people fresh to the media, not inculcated with the media rules… of newsworthiness, news value.”

What will the format be like? No-one knows yet, not even Nehl. That’s something that the successful candidates will decide. Welcome to Reality TV, 21st-century style, where the contestants decide the format. “The show may be raw and messy, but we hope they’ll have room to fail,” Nehl says.

In the cut-throat competition for ratings it’s a hard sell when you are pitching a TV show whose format is “we don’t know yet.” A big, fat mystery. But that’s part of the intrigue, and it’s the kind of pioneering creativity that the ABC loves. All that we’ve been promised is “topical issues that get beyond the news agenda.”

And what exactly does guru Nehl think about the way Reality TV is headed these days? “Reality television is just an expansion of the game shows of the 1950s,” he says. “They’ve just become more complex, but there’ll be more to come… and there are genres that haven’t even been invented yet.”

So perhaps it will be Chaser-esque. Perhaps it won’t. Perhaps, with this open-ended and open-minded attitude, Project Next will re-invent the reality television genre, as Nehl prophesied.

I guess we’ll find out when it airs.