Animal Planet to Debut Soap Opera for Stay-at-Home Pets
Silver Spring, MD – Cable television network Animal Planet announced today that they will soon be debuting a Soap Opera intended for Stay-at-Home pets.
The show, titled “Animal Instincts”, will focus on the fictional Salazar family, a powerful family of Black Labradors that are considered to be royalty and have a far reaching influence in their city of Salem, USA. However, beneath the glamorous exterior, the family has numerous skeletons in their closet which could be exposed at any moment and possibly ruin the family name that they’ve spent generations building up.
David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications, which owns the Animal Planet network, thinks the show is a great idea, saying, “A lot of people don’t realize how many pets just stay-at-home and watch television all day while their owners are at work. The number far exceeds the number of stay-at-home moms there are in this country, yet there’s nothing on television made especially for them. Because of this, we’ve decided to reach out to those pets and give them something to do for an hour of every day. Plus, we view every one of those pets as an untapped consumer for the products we will be advertising during the commercial breaks.”
Zaslav’s logic isn’t convincing everyone, however. “It’s definitely a reach.” says Robert Tollefson, a professor of Consumer Behavior at UC-Larely. “Animal Planet is banking that by exposing the pets to ads for pet products, they will be able to communicate their preference of a certain product to their owner by either consuming, or not consuming it. Whether or not this could ever happen is highly debatable, though, I’m definitely not willing to rule out its possibility just yet.” Tollefson also noted that even a slight uptick in the sales of products that advertise during the show could lead to numerous spin-offs and other animal networks adopting similar programming. He added, “We could be on the verge of something big.”
The FCC has been struggling in its decision of what rating to give the show. On one hand, Animal Planet has promised a lot of “hot and steamy romance”, but at the same time, there’s no human language in any of the scenes, so no one really knows what’s going on. FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, weighed in briefly on the show, saying, “The show clearly deals with some adult material, however, since there’s no dialogue, we aren’t sure exactly how much children can infer from watching it. We’ll probably just go with TV-14, since that’s what we give any show that doesn’t clearly fit into our rating system.”
