Reality TV rules — and draws ratings — at VH1

updated 7:48 p.m. ET Oct. 18, 2007

LOS ANGELES - Spend any amount of time watching VH1’s florid reality hit parade that includes “Flavor of Love,” “I Love New York” and “Rock of Love” and the thought naturally occurs: Who comes up with this stuff?

Meet Cris Abrego and Mark Cronin, the business partners and masterminds who have produced some of the channel’s most popular and most talked-about — or howled-about — shows, and who this year alone will flood VH1 with eight series.

October is a true Abrego-Cronin extravaganza. “I Love New York 2” debuts Monday, giving Tiffany “New York” Pollard a second shot at romance, or something like it. And there are two newcomers, “America’s Most Smartest Model,” about lookers who must also prove their intellect, or something like it, and “Gotti’s Way,” the comeback effort of hip-hop producer Irv Gotti.

VH1 programming executive Michael Hirschorn knows just who Cronin and Abrego are: a couple of hardworking creative whizzes who are “absolutely crucial to our success” and who understand what the channel’s target audience wants.

“Their shows definitely have a younger feel, a hipper feel than what you see on the networks,” Hirschorn said. “They also have a unique ability to capture the imagination of young adults” by executing “TV that’s aware it’s TV.”

“We’re for viewers who are hip to the artifice of a lot of television,” he explained, adding later: “The only sin is to be boring.”

Real reality TV?
The result is either a new-wave approach to comedy and soap opera, as Cronin, Abrego and Hirschorn describe it, or, as various critics would have it, another nail in the coffin of Western civilization and a ghetto-stereotype slap in the face of black Americans.

That’s not where they’re coming from, the producers say.

“Cris and I don’t have a political agenda. We don’t have an exploitation agenda,” said Cronin. “We take on a subject matter and make the best show we can about that. So the show’s about Flavor Flav and the women attracted to him and the lunacy that ensues from that.

“In the case of Bret Michaels, it’s women attracted to heavy metal hair bands and the lunacy that ensues from that,” he said.

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While “Flavor of Love” drew criticism for its depiction of the rapper’s unrestrained romantic life and the sometimes rough-edged women he was choosing among, it’s been a top-rated show among black viewers, Abrego noted.

“This is reality TV and those are real people doing real things,” he said.

Last October, 7.5 million people tuned in to the second-season finale of “Flavor of Love” to give VH1 its biggest audience ever and adding to the channel’s ratings recovery after its overdose of the “Behind the Music” bio series.

Childhood passion for TV
Not too shabby for a couple of college grads who plunged into show business without connections but with a childhood passion for TV. Cronin, a 43-year-old Philadelphia native, had to sneak his viewing between parent-ordered museum visits. Abrego, 35, who grew up in suburban Los Angeles, admits to an early fondness for anything from “Gilligan’s Island” to “Falcon’s Crest.”

Cronin fled the staid world of chemical engineering after five years and got his big break by parlaying free sketches for Howard Stern’s TV show into a job there. Abrego’s first gig was sports editor for a Palm Springs TV station, editing game highlights.

Cronin traveled from Stern to MTV, working as head writer and then producer of Jenny McCarthy’s “Singled Out.” He started his own company, Mindless Entertainment, with an emphasis on game shows (“Beat the Geeks”) and talk shows (“The X Show”).

Abrego, meanwhile, studied at the graduate school of reality pioneer Bunim-Murray Productions (“Real World”) and formed a company, 51 Pictures. When he and Cronin went into business together, creating 51 Minds Entertainment, they merged their experience, Abrego in reality and Cronin in comedy.

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