Reality check: Mark Burnett’s kingdom

Some see a new bid for legitimacy in his expansion plans. "I think there's some part of Mark that feels like he's proven himself in the reality business," says Jordan Levin, cofounder of production company Generate, who worked with Burnett at the WB (now the CW network). "He's very ambitious and wants to take on new challenges."

Adds Laura Caraccioli-Davis of Publicis Groupe's Starcom media-buying firm: "To be truly respected in Hollywood, you have to be a scripted guy. Those producers make money for everyone — the actors, the talent agencies. If you make everyone money, they have to bow to you."

Burnett bristles at that notion: "Roughly half of the top ten shows on TV are reality shows. They'll remain the bulk of our business, and to suggest that I wouldn't want it that way is silly."

Burnett was born in East London, the son of a Ford Motor plant worker. He never went to college, instead joining the Special Air Service Regiment in the British Army; he served as a paratrooper in the Falklands War. In 1982, at age 22, he flew to Los Angeles aiming to become a military adviser in Central America. His mother talked him out of that plan. He arrived with no job prospects but quickly found work as a nanny for a wealthy family in Beverly Hills.

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Two years later he began selling insurance, marketing credit cards and hawking T shirts on the boardwalk at Venice Beach, buying irregulars for $2 apiece and selling them for $18. "Mark Burnett could sell you the clothes you're already wearing," says Caraccioli-Davis. Like many in Los Angeles, he wanted to be a producer. In 1992 he got his first shot, buying U.S. rights to the "Raid Gauloises," an expedition-length adventure race. Burnett later renamed it the "Eco-Challenge" and, in a six-year run, sold TV rights to MTV, ESPN, the Discovery Channel and the USA Network, waiving his producer fee for a share of ad sales (a pitch he would use later, to great success).

In 1998 Burnett met Charlie Parsons, a British TV producer who had come up with an idea for a show in which unpaid contestants were stranded on a desert island and voted on who got eliminated, with the winner getting $1 million. Burnett bought the North American rights, named the show Survivor and shopped it to the four U.S. commercial broadcast networks, the Discovery Channel and the USA Network.

All of them turned him down. But a few months later CBS took a second look. In pitching CBS entertainment chief Leslie Moonves, as the writer Bill Carter recounts in his recent book "Desperate Networks," Burnett mocked up "Survivor" covers of Time and Newsweek (and both magazines later would put the show on their covers). Moonves bit, but he imposed tough terms: No matter what Burnett spent to produce Survivor, CBS would pay him a paltry fee of only $35,000 per episode; Burnett would have to make up the shortfall by pocketing half of the revenue from ads, which he had to help sell.

Survivor debuted in the summer of 2000 and fueled CBS' resurgence; 51 million viewers watched the first season's finale, the most watched reality episode ever. Burnett reaped a reported $10 million in the ad-sharing deal, to the dismay of CBS. The deal was revised after the first season, with the network retaining all ad sales — and paying Burnett a fee of $1 million per show.

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