The supermarket is the latest stop for cable television’s freak show.
J’aime Kirlew takes five hours to prepare for a trip to the grocery store, carrying with her a box of coupons and a list that shows every item the store sells and where it is located. She puts on her “game face,” applying makeup before heading to the checkout stand, and dances a jig when a nearly $2,000 shopping bill is reduced to $103.72.
“My image is very important to me,” said the paralegal from Bethesda, Md., on the hotly anticipated series Extreme Couponing, debuting on TLC on Wednesday. The show follows shoppers whose intense devotion to finding bargains can whittle a $555.44 grocery store bill down to $5.97.
Extreme Couponing adds to cable networks’ long list of programs about odd behaviours (Hoarders), unusual professions (Ice Road Truckers) and human tragedies (Intervention). TLC’s My Strange Addiction profiled a compulsive scab-picker, a woman who owned 20 cats despite being allergic to them and a woman convinced that her more than 200 pairs of shoes each have feelings.
Get it right, as History has done with Pawn Stars, and you’ve struck gold with a hit that can help define a network.
Extreme Couponing competes for best new show title with Discovery’s Hogs Gone Wild, about people whose jobs are to chase wild pigs.
TLC is excited about the show’s potential. The network previewed an episode of Extreme Couponing during the holidays last December, giving it little promotion. Executives hoped to get about 1 million viewers, and instead it got more than twice that, said Amy Winter, the station’s top executive.
“It just made this absolute connection to our audience, who wish they could save money like these people,” Winter said.
