\n<\/p>\n
The talent was beginning to lie down on the job. Temperatures had surpassed 90 degrees on a July afternoon in Ramapo Mountain State Forest in Northern New Jersey, and the actors were hot and literally panting. If they had to perform much longer, the director might face a mutiny.<\/p>\n
The director, Ron Levi, threw up his hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell them union is eight-hour work,\u201d he called out. \u201cWhat do you mean they\u2019re done?\u201d<\/p>\n
A horror story overheard at a recent SAG-AFTRA rally? Not exactly. The director, for starters, was joking. As for the actors \u2026 they didn\u2019t get the joke anyway.<\/p>\n
The stars \u2014 Beasley, Darby, Fuji and Whidbey \u2014 are among the four-legged leads on DogTV<\/a>, a pay-television service designed especially for dogs who are stuck at home alone. In the coming weeks, the Ramapo footage would be recolored, edited and scored for its colorblind, easily distracted and narratively challenged viewers \u2014 optimized, the makers of DogTV say, to engage and soothe a growing audience of bored and anxious dogs around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It wasn\u2019t your typical set visit. But then that\u2019s also why I was there: to see, as my boss had phrased it, \u201chow the Snausage is made\u201d for a network whose primary audience can\u2019t operate a remote. One thing I was learning was that when you have a canine cast, they \u2014 not the crew, not the guild \u2014 ultimately call the shots. Everyone agreed to call it a wrap.<\/p>\n \u201cThese dogs are the best we ever worked with, and they can deliver you the goods,\u201d Levi, who is also a founder of DogTV, said as the dogs were led by their trainer, Chrissy Joy<\/a>, back to their air-conditioned van for fresh water \u2014 and, presumably, some well-earned belly scratches.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I get it,\u201d Levi added. \u201cIt\u2019s very hot today, and we\u2019ve got to be mindful.\u201d<\/p>\n These are boom times for DogTV. During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic some 23 million households adopted pets, according to a 2021 survey by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals \u2014 a huge new potential audience to target.<\/p>\n Americans working from home were also watching a lot of TV \u2014 often, apparently, with their pets. In response, DogTV began offering a bunch of new human-targeted videos, notably featuring tips from experts on how to train all of these new pets. Subscriptions to its streaming app have grown by about 388,000 since mid-2020, the company said. (DogTV is also available through many cable and satellite providers.)<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were at home and started to ask us about content for them as well,\u201d Levi said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, OK, you\u2019ve got a new dog; what do you do with it?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Now DogTV is hoping to fill a new role, as more workers<\/a> return to the office<\/a> and their new dogs, many of whom have never known life without a human at home full-time, are dealing with intense separation anxiety. The network is producing content custom made for such anxiety \u2014 among dogs and, increasingly, their guilt-ridden humans.<\/p>\n Full disclosure: I am one of those guilt-ridden humans. I became a DogTV subscriber first around 2013, as the single dogfather of my beloved mutt Sailor. A few years later, after Sailor departed for that great dog park in the sky, I canceled my subscription.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When, in 2021, my partner and I got a new rescue puppy named Evie, I resubscribed, only to find that DogTV had grown by leaps and bounds. Sometimes I would come home tired from work only to realize that I had just been zoning out to DogTV on the couch for 20 minutes. The basic concept was the same \u2014 short, simple videos, mostly for dogs \u2014 but the creativity and production values had exploded. I wanted to know more about this world I unexpectedly found myself enjoying, even if I had to take it on faith that my blas\u00e9 new shelter dog was enjoying it, too.<\/p>\n That\u2019s when I reached out to Levi.<\/p>\n DogTV relies on teams of directors, camera operators, composers, editors and dogs. But if DogTV has a single mad wizard behind the curtain, it is Levi. Before DogTV, he worked in human TV in Israel, including as a writer for that country\u2019s version of \u201cThe Amazing Race.\u201d He doesn\u2019t miss it. \u201cThis is totally better because the dog is really the director,\u201d he told me. \u201cHe teaches you also to be a little bit modest.\u201d<\/p>\n During an editing session at a Manhattan studio in August, Levi, who is also the chief content officer, acknowledged tailoring the content in recent years to appeal more to humans. That wasn\u2019t true of just the new \u201cTips & Tricks\u201d videos, or of reality shows like \u201cFarm Girl,\u201d starring Joy and her dogs. Just as a good children\u2019s show must be semi-tolerable, if not enjoyable, to adults, TV for dogs must bow to a simple truth: The primary viewers aren\u2019t the ones who shell out $9.99 a month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Given this, Levi\u2019s ideal balance is for videos that appeal 80 percent to dogs and 20 percent to humans. The squeaky toy sound effects are for dogs. The shoots in Sicily \u2014 that stuff is for humans.<\/p>\n \u201cA hundred percent dog could mean showing a dog for 10 minutes \u2014 for five minutes because of the attention span \u2014 running from left to right with this white background,\u201d he added. \u201cThey don\u2019t care if it\u2019s a beautiful location in California.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But as the paying human, I indeed cared. I was drawn in by the visuals, which had become rather arty and sometimes downright weird, as when I watched a puppy in one video waddle through space<\/a>. Several videos featured sinewy swirls of color, set to a synthy, space-age score. Another had a dog placed digitally on a train, grinning as alpine mountains and crystal waters scrolled by through the window.<\/p>\n The music was often great: electronic, atmospheric, like a mix of Tangerine Dream and Tim Hecker. Ryan Wasoba, a producer based near St. Louis who has scored music for DogTV for a decade, acknowledged that he and his dog, Olivia, had been listening to a lot of Brian Eno when he first began composing for the channel. (Other times, the channel\u2019s music is more like the theme to \u201cRomper Room.\u201d)<\/p>\n When it comes to the channel\u2019s two-legged fans, I\u2019m apparently not alone. The actor Billy Bob Thornton<\/a> described watching DogTV with his daughter and two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels as \u201ckind of a Zen moment\u201d during a 2016 appearance on \u201cLive With Kelly.\u201d And although I\u2019ve never watched while partaking in certain forms of herbaceous relaxation, there is ample evidence<\/a> on social media<\/a> indicating that some DogTV subscribers do<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jay Guagliardo, a subscriber from Rochester, N.Y., said that he and his wife, Sylvia, had adopted two dogs, Benny and Penny, during shutdown. It wasn\u2019t always clear who in the house liked DogTV the most.<\/p>\n \u201cSylvia will come home from work, and I\u2019ll be sitting on the couch staring at freaking DogTV, and she\u2019ll be like, \u2018What are you doing?\u2019\u201d he said, laughing. \u201cAnd I\u2019m like, \u2018Well, you got to see this \u2014 they\u2019re going through the fields, and the ducks are following him.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAnd she\u2019s like: \u2018Oh my God, dude. Go back to work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Who was DogTV really for, anyway?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n To answer that question was partly to consider whether the dogs get much out of it. Guagliardo said DogTV had helped his dogs considerably when he began leaving them home alone for the first time since the pandemic as he resumed in-person meetings. He could tell, he said, because he often comes home to \u201ca present\u201d on the floor if he accidentally leaves them home without it.<\/p>\n Kate Senkier of Nashville said her two dogs, Piper and Puddles, the latter of whom she got immediately after the pandemic, started off as devoted \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d fans before they discovered DogTV. Now whenever she goes upstairs to work, she said, they \u201csit on the couch and look at me and wait for me to turn the TV on.\u201d<\/p>\n I have watched Evie watch DogTV, and sometimes she seems to care. Usually, I can\u2019t tell. In a study commissioned by DogTV, Nicholas Dodman, a professor emeritus of animal behavior at Tufts University, near Boston, found that dogs visibly watched DogTV around 14 percent of the time it was on. That was more than they watched Animal Planet and significantly more than they did CNN. (Luckily, dogs aren\u2019t the ones who pay for journalism, either.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But CNN provided perhaps the best analogy for the way Dodman thought dogs might experience DogTV. In general, dogs understand their world primarily by smell, then by sound, then by sight. It isn\u2019t clear how much dogs merely listen to DogTV, Dodman said, but it stands to reason that they do, just as humans will listen to TV in the background.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we had CNN on while we were cooking breakfast \u2014 you know, you\u2019re busy with the frying pan and stuff \u2014 and then someone says, \u2018There\u2019s going to be an earthquake,\u2019\u201d he said, you might suddenly look up and pay attention. Dogs, he reasoned, might be doing the same. Maybe they are always half listening.<\/p>\n That made abundant sense. I just wasn\u2019t sure what it said about humans like me and Billy Bob Thornton who become so fully absorbed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n