REVIEW. FOX Life's first local Fox banner production, Spirit, is oddly about death - as yet another weird psychic show lets loose a 'I see dead people' person claiming to 'connect' with the dead.

Who knows what FOX Networks Group Africa (FNG Africa) was thinking when it decided that the first locally produced show for its FOX Life (DStv 126 / StarSat 133 / Cell C black 202) channel under its in-house production banner should be about death featuring a so-called psychic. Who knows?

What this TV critic does know from seeing it, is that it looks bad, disjointed, schmaltzed up and fake, uninspiring, and completely beneath what FOX Life is and should be doing.

Instead of doing something different and new programming wise, FOX Life decided to go with the cheap shot TV charlatan genre by adding Spirit - as if viewers haven't had enough of TV gypsies doing tarot card readings for gullible, big-eyed subjects.

After South African viewers have seen SABC3's Crossing Over with John Edwards, kykNET's (DStv 144) Marietta Theunissen and her Die Ander Kant, then even her daughter, Julia Theunissen getting in on the act with her Tussen Twee Wêrelde on VIA (DStv 147), E! Entertainment's (DStv 124) Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry, TLC's (DStv 135) Long Island Medium with Theresa Caputo and Belinda Silbert who did Making Contact on SABC3 and then an e.tv version that flopped, you have to wonder why FOX Africa decided to do more of this vapid, indistinguishable and empty-calorie, polony television that has no replay value and doesn't add anything to viewers lives.

FOX invited only some press for a type of set visit and reached out to only certain media for interviews, deliberately ignoring others for whatever reason.

There's was no media preview, nor any advance screener episode made available as with other shows - also weird given that it's FOX Life's first local series (channels usually tout their "first of" shows).

Through it, FOX Africa created the distinct impression that it doesn't believe in its own show and possible know itself that it is dishing up a type of TV trash it's not really proud of.

With no background or any background knowledge of the show or Cindy Kruger at all, this review is solely based on having watched the linear broadcast of the first episode as it was shown on FOX Life this week.

It's fine if you've never heard about Cindy Kruger. This one has a notepad and starts scribbling furiously as apparently your dead flock to her - sort of like Coco.

She then "radiates" on levels, and makes a "connection" as she throws statements out there so that those doing a "reading" can find something in their lives to try and relate it to.

Cindy doesn't look Irish, yet Spirit's opening sequence that doesn't fit with how the rest of the show looks, wants to hype up airy Irish mystic qualities and plays like an Enya "Orinoco Flows" music video or an animated Celtic Woman CD cover.

Then we see aerial shots of Cindy walking a Celtic garden maze before all the rest of the setting is suddenly a type of rustic Rustenburg rural charm. It's a big visual disconnect.

The FOX Original Productions then shamelessly manipulates viewers with editing, cuts and music, with Spirit borrowing a lot from the soap/telenovela visual playbook to hype up non-existent drama and characterisation, to try and make the viewer feel things and feel a certain way. Take away the music or turn off the sound and see how the vapid show becomes even more lifeless.

Most hilariously and fakely, Spirit includes drum beats - going "baff, baff, baff" during pregnant pauses to hype up the drama - along with lovely dramatic mood music added after filming to help enhance the spectacle when Cindy does her "radiating" and the dead come to her.

The absence of anything really happening in Spirit, makes it all look even more silly, with the "baff, baff, baff" inserted exactly like when Brooke turns around in The Bold and the Beautiful, but before she tells Ridge that she's leaving him.

After "readings", someone with a steadicam that's deliberately still shaking to visually try and re-enforce how "shook" subjects are after Cindy "radiated" on her levels to make "soul connections", do close-ups.

This is clearly to try and capture the bewilderment of people who can't believe how Cindy knew about tombstones and dead people and to convey a type of temporary "emotionally claustrophobic" feeling to the viewer.

They say don't speak ill of the dead but strangely none of the dead who surround Cindy speak ill of the living. They give Cindy messages but she still has to ask people stuff to see what sticks.

Cindy's home (if it is her home) looks unnaturally spotlessly clean. Perhaps the dead come at night and clean.

Cindy's "radiating" and "readings" obviously takes longer and more time during actual filming but are edited down for punch. Viewers are not given a sense in Spirit of, or shown, what Cindy actually gets/got wrong or that subjects can't relate to (unless of course she's a perfect dead communicator).

Spirit feels and looks like it could and should rather be a regional late afternoon drive-time radio segment with callers phoning in, or would fit better on some community TV channel like GauTV, to whittle away an empty half hour or hour.

It's sad to see FOX Africa selling out with something simple like Spirit for FOX Life when it could invest in actual worthwhile programming that teaches and entertains and is unique to Africa and its female and developmental challenges - instead of cheapening its offering with psychic silliness as if its little more than a traveling TV circus.

Even a plain talk show for FOX Life would have been better than dishing up cheap psychic TV tricks ... baff, baff, baff.

FOX Upfront 2017: FOX Africa production director Levern Engel: Product placement incredibly valuable but Africa's TV biz should integrate brands in a much smarter way.

In a fascinating talk Levern Engel, director of productions at FOX Networks Group Africa, insightfully explained how product placement on television is incredibly valuable but how Africa's television industry has not yet nearly realised its full potential with this ad-hopping panacea.

Levern Engel urged South Africa and Africa's TV industry, ad buyers and ad agencies to wake up to the broader and bigger possibilities of the fast-growing phenomenon of TV product placement and said that the African continent's TV and advertising biz needs to invest in the effort and expertise to do integrated product placement on television in much smarter ways.

The experienced producer Levern Engel heads up FOX Africa's brand-new production unit, FOX Networks Group Original Productions Africa.

On Wednesday in Johannesburg at FOX Networks Group Africa's FOX Upfront 2017, she wowed the crowd when she addressed advertisers and ad buyers, the press and TV executives from the stage in her incredibly illuminating speech.

In a smart speech worthy of being a TEDx Talk for Television - if TEDx ever were to create a subset platform for eloquent thinkers discussing and unpacking TV's most pressing issues - Levern Engel told attendees that "I want you to imagine".

"I want you to imagine what the possibilities could be on the content production side moving forward. I want us to imagine not what the trends are now, but what the new trends are that we can create in TV content."

Levern Engel said she wanted to use the opportunity to "engage on the issue of how do production industries and media partners work with brands and their agencies, and what opportunities exist that we haven't explored in the way that we could have possibly explored."

"Every piece of content is a business. That's why people now have their own YouTube channels. They're basically creating content, sitting at home. People blogging are making money."

"I envy some of those paychecks I hear bloggers are earning every month. Every piece of content - whether it is digital, print, television, music movies - is a business."

"And creatives only really have two currencies that they can engage with: The first is their time, and the second is their talent. And somewhere along the line - but I think that is changing now - people felt that they shouldn't have to pay for creatives' time," said Levern Engel.

"It was essentially like saying to a baker, 'I want your bread, but I won't pay for it'. I think you know what he's going to say."

"Content is critical to FOX - it's key to our business," she said.

"If we don't have content, we don't have channels - it's that simple. You want to put up a blank screen, that's fine, but I don't think anybody's going to watch it. Advertisers are not going to pay for that."

"So content is critical to FOX's existence. The day FOX said start this business [FNG Original Productions Africa], they said: 'What would be your plan?' I couldn't turn around and say 'Actually I'm not so good with the business stuff, I'm more a creative."

"I think every creative entity needs to understand the business side of business because that's what you're really hired to do even if you have your own entity."


Product placement incredibly valuable - but do it right
"So generally how does content gets financed? I think everybody knows this, I'm not going to teach anyone in the room, right? But I do want to focus on this issue of product placement because I think we haven't mined it in the way that we possibly can."

"Product placement is an incredibly valuable vehicle but you've got to do it right. You've got to do it right," said Levern Engel.

"There were a lot of articles over the past couple of years - even though I was sitting outside of South Africa I was still obviously following a lot of stuff."

"I know Thinus for example, you spoke about the fact that the product placement in the soaps 'is still so obvious guys, you're killing us and you're offending our audience".

"In Empire we've done it. So we've done it on FOX but it was a very classy, very sexy piece of product placement because it was built into the story," said Levern Engel. who then showed this clip:



"So lets imagine something. Let's imagine you have a scene which is set in a hotel lobby. It's a series about a hotel. You have a guest that you have booked in. What is he wearing?"

"Is he wearing a branded cap? A polo shirt. He's in a hurry so he looks at his watch. He takes out his wallet. He opens it up and pays with his Visa."

"We've used 5 brands in the space of one minute of screen time," said Levern Engel, "and that's when you do product placement properly."

"When we sit and we create, we have to say, 'What brands are out there?' And then for every scene that we write, we have to ask what are the opportunities, so that it doesn't feel like it's being forced down viewers' throats".

"The reality is that we live in a world of logos and brands. That's the reality. And when you do product placement, it reflects a reality."

"If we didn't have those brands in there, it would feel like an isolated, separate universe. It doesn't feel connected to the viewer's reality. So product placement is an ideal space for us to start playing."

"Predominantly we have international brands, and that's what enjoys the most engagement with consumers. However, with the economic downturn, African brands have lost equity in the market," said Levern Engel.

"Part of making content is not about creative at all. It actually sits in the realm of trade and investment. You are trading and investing, and there are many partners [in the value chain] that are doing that."

"This is an ideal opportunity for African brands to start regaining ground on their home soil."

FOX Upfront 2017: New production unit, FNG Original Productions Africa, will produce content from Africa for anyone; hub is platform agnostic, says productions director Levern Engel.

FOX Networks Group Africa has started its own South African production unit called FOX Networks Group Original Productions Africa and while it will be producing local South African and African content for the various FNG Africa channels, it will also be producing shows for any other TV channel as a channel-agnostic production hub.

On Wednesday at FOX Networks Group Africa's FOX Upfront 2017, the experienced producer Levern Engel, FNG Africa director for productions, said that FOX Africa's new production unit will not just be making content for FOX channels but for anyone.

"FOX Networks Group decided last year that they wanted to diversify the business and they said: 'What do we do?' And they said 'We do what everybody else in the media space does: We create a production hub because we're in the business of content."

"We should have someone who conceptualise content, make content, commissioning content - that's what we should do. And that was the genesis of FNG Africa's production unit," she explained.

"The unit was only officially registered a month and a half ago and for the moment you will know us simply as FNG Original Productions Africa," said Levern Engel to applause.

"So what is our function? Our function is not only to support the FOX Networks Group Africa channels - the FOX, FOX Life and National Geographic channels."

"Does FNG Original Productions Africa support FOX and FOX Life? Of course we do. Do we support National Geographic? Yes. Do we support anybody else? Can I produce for Netflix? Yes. Can I produce for - pick a channel? The answer is yes," said Levern Engel.

"FNG Original Productions Africa is platform and channel agnostic. FNG Original Productions Africa is a production unit that is completely agnostic. It's only ambition in life is to produce quality content that comes out of Africa."

"FNG Original Productions Africa has a scripted slate, it has a non-scripted slate, but all of these productions originate from Africa - most of them will be produced in Africa. So that's the function of FNG Original Productions Africa," said Levern Engel.