TV trends are usually pretty pre dictable — doctors one year, law yers the next.
No one guessed that 2010 would be the year of the little people.
Spike TV is expected to announce next week that it’s launching a program called “Half Pint Brawlers” this summer, a half-hour reality series starring little person wrestlers.
It joins Animal Planet’s new docu-soap “Pit Boss” — set to debut next month — about Shorty Rossi, a little person actor who has turned his life to rescuing neglected pit bulls in LA.
And TLC is gearing up this week to bring back “Little Chocolatiers,” about a Salt Lake City chocolate shop run by little people, for an additional six episodes beginning late next month.
TLC’s mini-hit (no pun intended) “Little People, Big World“– about a married couple and their kids, some of average height, some not — which began in 2006, is the father of the genre.
It cleared the path last summer for “The Little Couple,” starring newlyweds Jen, a neonatologist, and Bill, who owns his own telecommunication company, as they contemplate starting a family. But being little is, it seems, no longer enough to get on TV.
“Puppet is this incredibly charismatic character,” says Sharon Levy, senior vice president of original series at Spike TV, about the star of “Half Pint Brawlers.”
The six-episode series follows the over-the-top antics of Puppet, who calls himself “the Psycho Dwarf,” and his stable of “psycho midget” wrestlers as they travel the country putting on shows, building a successful business and dealing with the bigger world.
“The fact that they are little people is irrelevant,” Levy says. “No matter what that person looked like, if they came in and they had that personality, I was going to do a show about them — they could’ve been coal miners with big personalities.”
Still, Levy concedes that the world of little people holds a unique fascination for people of average height.
“There’s always going to be something interesting about learning about people that are different from you,” she says.
“But at the end of the day there has to be something that’s relatable and that you recognize in yourself.”