I’m on TV. So vote for me.
This appeared to be the meat of Kevin O’Leary’s pitch when he made his public political debut recently. Graduating from a long-honed persona as lusty capitalist to would-be Canadian emancipator, the Shark Tank judge wasn’t exactly beating around bushes when he appeared in Halifax at a debate featuring leadership hopefuls for the Conservative Party. His plan? To grow the party’s base by drawing people — millennials, mostly — who like that he’s a reality star on television. He actually said that!
Now, I like O’Leary just fine. He’s moderately amusing and good at affairs of the vault, and I even found myself at a party at his house some months ago, but this was . . . well . . . a bit bonkers. As someone who has an advanced degree from the American Celebrity Institute and has spent a career covering this stuff, it behooves me to give some context on the man’s precise standing in the celebrity firmament.
So never mind that most millennials don’t have cable and even if they did they aren’t zipping to Shark Tank — and keeping in mind that TV-land, these days, is a mass pinata from which celebrities fall every which way — this is my very scientific analysis: on a scale of 1 to Fame, O’Leary lies somewhere in the spectrum between Shoshanna on Girls, Crazy Eyes on Orange Is the New Black, that callow clairvoyant Tyler Henry on the hit spook-show Hollywood Medium and CNN’s Don Lemon.
Looking at it on another graph, O’Leary is in there somewhere with Fredrik on Million Dollar Listing (New York edition), that chick who’s on Veep now but once child-starred with Macaulay Culkin in My Girl, the sine qua non Rob Mariano (the four-time Survivor contestant) and Homer’s boss on The Simpsons, Mr. Burns (to whom Kevin bears some resemblance, as others have noted).
You want to hitch your coattails to the wings of TV, Kev? OK, then allow me to underline this: the multi-channel universe, combined with streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, has driven such a surge that over the last five years the number of scripted shows alone on these various platforms grew 71 per cent. In 2016, there were a record 455 scripted shows. (Moreover, on an existential level for millennials, everybody is on “TV,” everyone the quasi-star of their own personal network, be it on Instagram or whatnot.)
Bottom line: the small screen just ain’t what it used to be. It’s not the days of Hart to Hart, when Robert Wagner found his purpose, post the drowning of wife Natalie Wood, solving dapper crimes with Stefanie Powers. Heck, it’s not even the era of Ally McBeal, when short-short skirts ruled, the Barry White flowed and lawyers in Boston were on the vanguard with TV’s premiere unisex loo.
This is the thing: the wafer-thinness of TV-lebrity is because — simply put — “water-cooler subjects of decades past had far more reach than the water-cooler subjects of today,” as Slate writer Willa Paskin sized up recently. Numbers tell the tale: 140 million people watched the miniseries Roots way back. Eighty-three million watched the conclusion of Dallas’s “Who Shot J.R.?” storyline. Forty-four million watched a single episode of Murphy Brown in 1992 (after the fictional character was infamously attacked by then vice-president Dan Quayle).
Meanwhile, fewer than a million were tuning in for the average episode, more recently, of Mad Men during its run (a show that loomed much larger in the media, and its impact on fashion and interior design, than in the number of actual eyeballs on the prestige series).
Or consider this: as ubiquitous as the Kardashians seem to be, their show on E! was averaging maybe 2 million viewers per episode last season, a number that amounts to less than 1 per cent of the American population (and even less in Canada). It’s also a stat that suggests the family’s combined juggernaut status on social media actually piggybacks their reality show rather than the other way around.
O’Leary’s greatest leveraging of his own fame to date, by the way? It happened two years ago, when he met Courtney Love for dinner at Craig’s on Melrose in L.A. Taking a break from covering Bruce Jenner’s Adam’s-apple removal and other big stories of the time, TMZ caught them outside. And O’Leary later gave an interview, explaining that it was all just biz, that he’d been counselling the singer on Kurt Cobain’s music catalogue. From my celebrity-tracking perspective, what was notable then was the choice of restaurant: Craig’s is one of the places where stars go precisely to be caught by paparazzi. It’s a thing.
But, hey, if we’re gonna start picking Canadian political leaders from TV, is O’Leary the best we can do, in any case? What about Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek? His whole brand involves getting answers, after all. Or how ’bout Nathan Fillion? Now that his show Castle has wrapped after eight seasons, he might be free. He seems nice. If we want to stick to tough-love TV judges, what about the London, Ont.-sprung Brad Goreski, star of Fashion Police. I like his glasses.
The dirty little secret? O’Leary may not even be the most famous Canadian personality on Shark Tank. That laurel goes to Toronto’s Robert Herjavec. He’s the one, after all, who’s appeared on the cover of People magazine (the magnum opus of celebrity) and even double-dipped in reality TV waters when he appeared on Dancing With the Stars, an experience that later led him to marry his dancing partner.
To put it another way: the Conservative party aspirant is definitely a few carpool karaokes short of a James Corden in the pop culture landscape. And — for the love of chicken piccata — it isn’t like he’s exactly Ina Garten either.
And, no, he ain’t Donald Trump. Look closer.
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