Falling stars & rising ratings

[Brian Damage]

Britney, Mel, Anna Nicole.

The highly visible downward spirals of big-name celebrities have proven to be an even bigger boon for producers of TV shows than real-life incidents as fodder for fictional crime stories.

"I don't think the TV shows are changing," says Warren Leight, executive producer of "Law & Order: Criminal Intent." "I think there may be a downward mobility to our celebrity culture. ... People of less and less accomplishment are getting their 15 minutes of fame. And these people tend to malfunction at an alarming rate."

And those headlines fuel writers' imaginations. Sort of.

Leight should know.

Tonight at 9 on NBC, "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" uses the recent wacky tale of the loved-crossed astronaut as a jumping-off point for a storyline. And next week "Criminal Intent" rips liberally from Anna Nicole Smith's life and death.

"We're seeing more and more coverage of less and less evolved people," Leight says.

Every episode of "L&O" starts with an onscreen graphic reading: "The following story is fiction and does not depict any actual person or event."

Don't believe everything you read.

While "L&O" and similar shows use routine dysfunctional-family murders as a backbone of their stories, it's not unusual to see a few celebrity stories each season.

Recently, for instance, CBS' "CSI: Miami" did an episode where the investigators looked into a movie star's death while he was in a celebrity rehab center. At the end of the episode, a troubled young character was shown beginning to shave her head, a la Britney Spears.

In November, "Law & Order" did an episode starring Chevy Chase as a Mel Gibson-type actor arrested while driving drunk, and who let loose a torrent of Gibson-like epithets.

The shows don't do exact replications of the real-life tales, yet the stories are close enough to make the connection.

On tonight's show, there's a love triangle with astronauts. There's also a scene where one of the detectives finds a bag with a wig and pepper spray, all stuff real astronaut Lisa Nowak allegedly had when confronting a female rival in Orlando, Fl.

Next week's "Criminal Intent" has Kristy Swanson playing a buxom, drugged-out Smith-like character who, soon after after giving birth, sees her teenage son die, and then dies herself.

The celebrity-inspired shows generate more media attention than the run-of-the-mill murder story, which, producers hope, pays off in bigger ratings.

No surprise, these shows are rolled out during sweeps, which are key ratings periods used by stations around the country to set future advertising rates.

"Most of what we do is cutting and pasting three or four different crimes into one story," Leight says, noting there were no murders in either the Smith or NASA cases. "People already have projected theories onto these stories before you get there. You hope you can create a world that's real enough."

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