Hard bodies, hard numbers
ESPN2's arousing early-morning exercise shows strike pay dirt
By LAWRENCE S. DIETZ
If you asked most people to free-associate to the words "sexy" and "TV network," chances are they'd respond, "Fox." Reverend Donald Wildmon and his vigilante crew of moralistic sheet-sniffers would probably say, "All TV, especially daytime soaps and smutty sitcoms." The more adventurous or up-scale might point to pay-cable: Showtime, with its "Red Shoes Diary" (naked actresses shot from the front, naked actors from the rear, simulated sex between the two guaranteed in every episode), or HBO, running "Strangers" (naked actresses and actors, as above) and "Sex Bytes," a faux-cybersexual spin-off of HBO's "Real Sex." Both have real people unclothed, but in this new version they send sexy messages via chat rooms, sometimes sporting dog collars or nipple clamps.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
The sexiest TV network is ESPN2.
Every weekday morning it runs five continuous hours of skimpily clothed, fabulous bodies, as healthy as, and a lot better-looking than, the volleyball players whose photographs ran in nudist magazines of the 1940s. Starting at 7:00 a.m., Eastern time (no tape delay for the west coast), ESPN2 broadcasts five half-hour exercise shows in a row: "Cory Everson's Gotta Sweat," "Fitness Beach," "Kiana's Flex Appeal," "BodyShaping," "Crunch Fitness," and repeats them in juggled order, with one extra airing of "Flex Appeal" at 6 p.m. Eastern time.
I first discovered exercise shows a couple of years ago, when I was looking for something on TV to accompany the swoosh-swoosh sound of our NordicTrack. Back then ESPN had an exercise show starring Gilad, a cheery Israeli who led groups doing aerobics on the beach in Hawaii, and another with the relentlessly perky Denise Austin (sister of tennis champion Tracy), whose target audience seemed to be women like her -- suburban mothers of two, trying to get their figures back. Neither program was sufficiently motivating.
But then there was "BodyShaping." The guy leading the muscle training, Rick Valente, was a little bulked up for my taste, but he was funny, and the aerobics leader, Kendall Jackson, had the Platonic ideal of a man's body.
Ah, and then there were the girls. Watching their segments was something like peeking in the window of a sorority house, as Jennifer and Kimeko and Kiana groused about the pizzas they weren't eating, all the while working on their abs, glutes, delts and quads, as the camera zoomed in, very lovingly, on their flexing muscles. And all of them (all the current ESPN2 exercise show women, for that matter) shared a physical characteristic: they had breasts, unlike zealous female body-builders, who lose the fatty tissue on their chests.
This was a guy thing, I thought, especially after friends told me that the early morning clientele in certain West L.A. fitness centers -- lawyers, stockbrokers and studio executives revving themselves up before the office -- demanded "BodyShaping" on the projection TV screen. I imagined a scene out of Terry Southern, or at least "Benny Hill" -- guys on their stationary bikes and other equipment, going faster and faster as they watched the girls pumping away, until at least one guy would keel over, whether from overexertion or unrealized passion.
But then, a friend's wife asked about our NordicTrack, and I admitted I tuned into "BodyShaping" while on it. The woman turned out to be a big fan of the show; she had watched it enough to know who was who, and some of the personal facts the girls had let drop -- Jennifer, for example, had been married and weighed 150 pounds, until she got the workout religion. Bye-bye ballast, hasta la vista hubby. We wound up confessing to each other that for us the star of the show was Kiana Tom, a beautiful Eurasian woman with a sensational physique and a wicked sense of humor. Kiana was given to ooohing over any guest guys on the show as they pumped their weights. "You're s-o-o-o cut, s-o-o-o buff," she would coo, and the guys' faces, already contorted by exertion, would show the added strain of puzzlement: was she putting them on? (Yes. Very.)
And then Kiana disappeared from "BodyShaping" -- a prelude, it turned out, to a reshuffling of the TV exercise deck. In a recent interview, ESPN2 programming exec Ron Semiano told me he decided to change his network's emphasis to what he called "body sculpting. We don't want shows with heavy-duty body building." Serious body building, with its steroid subculture and bodies ballooned into near-caricature, would not appeal to a wider audience. Semiano's exercise shows would promote a healthy lifestyle.
Kiana re-emerged as the centerpiece of the ESPN2 exercise programming block. For all Kiana and Co.'s sexiness, the workouts are long on useful technique, short on solipsism, in part because none are shot in gyms, where wall-to-wall mirrors encourage overt self-obsession. "BodyShaping," "Flex Appeal," and "Fitness Beach" are shot outdoors at resort hotels in Hawaii or the Caribbean, "Gotta Sweat" mostly outdoors at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, and "Crunch Fitness" on a set that reeks of urban angst.
And the prime beef here isn't just for hormonally-excitable kids. "BodyShaping" has the delightful chutzpah to continue featuring Mary Jean Traetta, a 50-ish mom of a college-age kid, and her 70-something father-in-law, Sal Traetta, both of whom look just fine in Spandex, thank you.
Semiano's programming savvy has paid off -- ESPN2 ratings for the morning exercise block are up 90 percent over a year ago. If those ratings are driven as much by early-rising voyeurs as by high-minded endorphin junkies, who's counting?
Lawrence S. Dietz is editorial manager of the News & Reference and Regional sections of Excite. In between sessions on his AbFlex, he can be reached at LSDietz@ix.netcom.com