A cable reality show debuting tonight will take a lighthearted look at two of the Delta’s local news teams at WABG and WXVT.
“Breaking Greenville” will air for the first time tonight at 9:30 on truTV. The program follows reporters, anchors and producers at both stations — as well as their shortcomings, miscues and silly news stories — as they deliver the news.
The documentary series sets up the staff at WABG and WXVT as rivals in the occasionally cut-throat news business as they vie to break stories and top each other in the ratings. In reality, the two Greenville stations are both operated by Commonwealth Broadcasting Group, which has no affiliation with The Greenwood Commonwealth.
In a one-minute online trailer for “Breaking Greenville,” the show appears to play up the small-town characters, technical glitches and other problems at the small-market news station.
In a brief review of the program for the New York Times, television critic Neil Genzlinger called the program “preposterous,” “a mock mockumentary” and a light-hearted — if real — balance to HBO’s fictional series “The Newsroom.”
Among the central figures in “Breaking Greenville” are Lucy Biggers, the since-departed co-host of “Good Morning Mississippi”; Christopher Mathis, longtime chief meteorologist for WABG; the station’s news director, Pam Chatman; WXVT anchor and meteorologist Steve Schill; and Eric Zernich, a recently arrived reporter and weekend meteorologist for WXVT.
The online trailer for “Breaking Greenville” kicks off with the morning news team at WABG — Mathis and Biggers — attempting to launch into a breaking news update before technical difficulties cut the program short.
In an interview with the Hartford Courant, Biggers — a Connecticut native who left WABG after two years in October — said the staff didn’t do much to alter their work for the reality TV cameras or contrive situations for the program.
“You don't play to reality cameras, you just go on with your life, and because of the situations we're in — young people with no experience, aging equipment, different personalities — a lot of the things that are featured in the show happen organically, and they are there capturing it,” Biggers told the Courant.
Still, the program — at least judging by previews posted online — has frequent moments of deadpan humor, leading Yahoo TV to compare “Breaking Greenville” to a real-life version of the hit NBC faux-reality series “The Office” and compare it with the 1996 feature comedy “Waiting for Guffman,” a Christopher Guest-directed mockumentary that follows members of an eccentric — and often incompetent — small-town Missouri community theater troupe who believe a Broadway producer will be attending one of their productions.
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
