Watching Joan River's promos on TV Land for the second season of her show, How'd you Get So Rich, is like watching a new age version of good cop, bad cop. Unfortunately, some of Joan River's promo's are in bad taste as Joan Rivers is seen searching out rich people while avoiding "boring" regular income people.
I'm surprised that Joan Rivers did not ask for help from Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice teams to design some television promo's for Joan to use. It seems like a cross promotion opportunity between the two shows has been missed. It might have just been a timing issue as Celebrity Apprentice is probably done filming by now while Joan's second season has possibly just recently started filming.
After viewing the facebook page for How'd you get so Rich, I have to commend TV Land and Joan Rivers for actually asking fans to submit sample questions that Joan might end up selecting to ask her "rich" guests.
The ridiculing of boring middle income people in Joan's earlier promos seems to have recently been supplemented with a brief explanation that the rich people featured on her show used to be "just like the rest of us". This is a huge step forward and I'm glad that somebody realized how crass and not completely thought out the earlier promos were.
I tried finding the earlier "How'd you get so Rich" promo's on Youtube that I thought were offensive but had no luck. I guess we can call that the bad cop, invisible cop move. Show the offensive "How'd you get so Rich promos" on TV Land, just don't put them on youtube or on the net where anyone can study them.
This is where copyright issues get murky in my opinion. Should I not be allowed to copy the Joan River's How'd you get so rich promos and upload them to YouTube for the express purpose of using the promo to make a social commentary? Why is it ok to inflict the origina message on the masses for profit, but someone cannot comment on the messages by using the same content for commentary purposes only?
Overall I think the newer "How'd you get so Rich" promo's and the facebook page for How'd You Get so Rich seem to be heading in the right direction. I wonder if Donald Trump has mentioned Joan's show on his own Celebrity Apprentice show since Joan has appeared on Celebrity Apprentice this season.
Ultimately, I think it is terrific that there is a How'd you Get so Rich facebook page that is welcoming suggestions for questions that Joan Rivers may ask her guests. and I hope the show properly credits whomever's questions they use.
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Edit update (May 03, 2010). I had a chance to see a show from last season and saw Joan fishing for stories on Rodeo Drive. It was a reminder to me about how difficult it really is, and costly as well, to line up guests for any television show.
It takes real money to hire a staff, have an office, send out PR, get leads, pre-interview the leads...or, just have Joan go out on Rodeo Drive and blitz people who are walking by and who look rich!
Good for Joan! The ability to mine the public streets for a story is compelling and spontaneous.
However, spontaneous story telliing is not so good for the economy and the all the people NOT BEING hired to do legitimate work for her show. Since the cost of show is kept artificially down, it will make it that much harder for other shows to get made down the road.
How'd Joan get so rich, by keeping her overhead so low, and maybe by depriving others of a job on her own show.
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