The television season about to draw to a close has showcased more personalities with Franco-American surnames than ever before, according to a totally unofficial and undocumented survey by this writer. It could be a gut feeling, or the fact that I’ve been watching much too much TV lately, but it does seem like many French names have popped up on credits in the past few months.
The ratings surprise of the season, Dancing with the Stars, had not one but two big Franco-American names: Tom Bergeron, the ever-smiling and affable host, and Kate Gosselin, one half of the famed reality show ex-couple and the most talked about dancer of the season.
Now, Bergeron is one of the country’s best known TV hosts, but few are aware that his roots are strongly New England: born in Haverhill, Mass., and young radio and TV personality in Portsmouth, NH, and Boston. His first TV hosting job was for Granite State Challenge, a high school quiz show on NH Public Television. He was at WENH-TV at the same time I was, as producer of the Franco-American children’s show The Franco File. (I don’t think we ever met, but the TV director for the pilot of my show was a young lady who dated Tom at the time, and I think they eventually got married.)
One important thing about Bergeron – beyond his obvious talent – is that he kept his name at a time when many aspiring radio hosts and deejays would anglicize their last names. Does anyone remember Jack Smacks, famous deejay from the Worcester, Mass. area in the ‘60s, whose real name was Jacques Frappier? Bergeron’s career escalated when he moved to California and got the spot as host of Hollywood Squares, and later America’s Funniest Home Videos and Dancing with the Stars. And, the rest is Wikipedia history.
Ms. Gosselin, one of the dancers on the current season, owes her tabloid fame to the TLC reality show Jon and Kate Plus 8 that featured her and husband Jon Gosselin and their eight (!) children. The show started in 2005 and ended in 2009 when the couple announced they were splitting up after ten years and a set of twins and sextuplets (hence the 8 of the title.) Both the reality program and the media frenzy that followed the couple’s split have been controversial as was Kane’s performance on Dancing.
Ratings on TV have rarely been hurt by controversy and a couple of Dancing programs this season won the ratings war for ABC, including for the first week of April when it beat out American Idol, surprising Hollywood and Madison Avenue watchers alike.
Kate Gosselin, however, is not Franco-American. Née Katie Kreider, she was born in Pennsylvania where she met and married Jon Gosselin. The latter’s father is Franco-American and his mother is Hawaiian. But, for the purposes of this blog, it’s the name that counts, which explains the presence of Kate Gosselin and the absence of Christopher Meloni of Law & Order, SVU although his mother is Franco-American.
Another top-rated show, Castle, has Nathan Fillion in the lead role. It’s surprised everyone in the ratings game in part because of its position following Dancing on ABC. Some writers have placed the show’s success on the star quality of Fillion, a former soap opera star and heartthrob from One Life to Live, Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (And, you thought I watched PBS all the time.) Fillion, by the way, is a native of Edmonton, Alberta, and I suppose he could be considered a Franco-American as much as most of our ancestors who left Canada to make a living in the United States.
The most prominent French surname of the current TV season was probably Gervais, as in Ricky Gervais, the UK-born actor, comedian, writer and producer whose credits read like a Who’s Who of Television of the past decade. Most people recognize him from the HBO series Extras, a follow-up to the original The Office he created for British TV. Gervais’ father, Lawrence Raymond Gervais of London Ontario, was stationed in London (the original one) and met the TV star’s mother during a blackout. In the current season, Rickey Gervais hosted the 67th Golden Globe Awards, he appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and was panelist on Jerry Seinfeld’s The Marriage Ref. To date, he’s made 15 guest appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman. And, of course his name appears several times a week on the credits of The Office as the program’s creator.
The name that has warmed my heart the most, however, is that of Yvon Chouinard, the Lisbon, Maine, native, who appears on commercials for the environmentally-conscious American Express Members Project. A world-renowned mountain climber, Chouinard founded a company that produced steel pitons for rock climbing, and, as he says in the American Express ad, he became aware of the environmental damage caused by his pitons and changed the manufacturing process. He is credited with introducing the clean climbing movement to North America. He also founded Patagonia, a sports clothing manufacturer with world-wide sales that, among other things, propelled the organic cotton industry in California.
So what does all this mean? I’ll let the sociologists and anthropologists ponder that one. I’ll just keep tuned in, and maybe in a few seasons we’ll have a Franco-American version of Jersey Shore – perhaps filmed at Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Can’t wait for that one.
