When Lucy Biggers of Fairfield graduated from Tulane University two years ago, she looked for the kind of job that would give her a lot of experience.
WAGB, the ABC affiliate in Greenville, Miss., certainly gave her that.
Though it was the 190th market in the U.S. (out of 210), the new grad got a lot of responsibility.
“I was producer of the morning show and anchor,” Biggers says, “booked guests and created content for the show, and after the show was over each morning I’d be a reporter and my own film videographer. So I really did everything, which sounds insane, but you really get a crash course on how to put on a TV show, how to cover the news and how to present yourself on camera.”
She got an unexpected chunk of experience too when reality TV cameras invaded the station, chronicling the almost comical rivalry between the station and its only competitor, the CBS affiliate WXVT.
Biggers unwittingly became star of the new series, “Breaking Greenville,” premiering 10:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29 on truTV, as the greenhorn in a ratings battle with a rival station in a wide area of the Mississippi Delta where there is very little news.
In an interview last week from New York, Biggers, 24, says she was a year and a half into her “Good Morning Mississippi” job when the cameras came in. But she was still being reprimanded for saying “awesome” a lot in interviews and giving a high five to a farmer after a filmed piece featured in the first episode.
There are problems at the station, too, where the TelePrompTer goes kaput minutes into the start of a day’s broadcast and everyone is always adjusting chairs.
If Biggers has the role of fresh-faced anchor-in-training, her colleagues have their own personalities, from the general assignment producer who sings to a news director who calls herself “The Oprah of the South.”
The competing news team seem to have as many quirks, from the ultra-competitive Callie Carroll of “Delta Daybreak” who decides to weigh herself on camera as a ratings ploy, to a meteorologist who dreams of a midsized market.
Turning local TV into a reality show can undermine the seriousness of news operations, and Biggers says her family had their doubts when she told them about the show.
“Reality TV has this association that’s very negative,” she says. “And my dad was like, ‘Will they turn you into a Kardashian?'”
But Biggers says the production team from Electus, whose other shows include “Southern Justice,” “Style by Jury “and” Mob Wives, didn’t coach them
“You don’t play to reality cameras, you just go on with your life,” Biggers says, “and because of the situations we’re in — young people with no experience, aging equipment, different personalities —- a lot of the things that are featured in the show happen organically, and they are there capturing it.”
Biggers grew up in a household of TV experience. While her father worked in finance, her mother, Martha “Sissy” Biggers, was a lifestyle host on Food Network’s “Ready, Set and Cook!” who was often a contributor on the “Today” and “CBS Early Show.”
“Going with her, as a child, to her studios to see the workings of the camera and the director, and the ins and outs of television really drew me in,” Lucy Biggers says.
And while she had her hands full with her anchoring, reporting and producing duties for WAGB, the recent college grad had to adjust to a second camera crew focused at her as well.
“It’s really a hall of mirrors kind of experience,” she says. “I would still be catering to my Greenville audience but know that my American audience was there, or would eventually be there. So it was a very weird headspace to be in, and one that I couldn’t talk to anyone about, because who else has had this experience?”
Respect vs. Fame
Trading in news credibility for reality TV fame was “definitely a very valid concern that I think people at the station had,” Biggers says. “But I was the rallying cry —- like ‘Come on guys, this is a once in a lifetime thing. If we make the best of it and we want it to be a positive show, we’ll create a positive show. If we devolve into cattiness and small-minded bickering that you see in a lot of these other shows, then that’ll be the show that we get. But we’re not like that.’
“They’re not going to be putting a gun to our head and make us something that we’re not,” Biggers says. “If they would have put me in a position where I felt uncomfortable, I would have just said no. You can’t force someone to get up on a stage and dance, if the person doesn’t want to dance.”
Fears were calmed once the producers arrived, she says. “They were really, really nice, they were really respectful of our jobs and our professionalism — and our desire to keep it positive and keep it light.”
And what she’s seen so far of the eight-episode season convinces her they captured just that.
Reality cameras helped her in another way — watching how they worked, and what angles they covered helped her in her own camera work. “They told me, ‘Lucy, your filming has gotten better since we’ve been there.'”
The competition may be amped up between the two blonde morning show anchors in “Breaking Greenville,” Biggers says. But she adds, “it’s fun for a reality show to have high stakes.”
But here’s a spoiler alert: If there is a second season of “Breaking Greenville,” Biggers won’t be part of it.
She left the station at the end of her two-year contract in October. “For my personal journey, I had to explore the next chapter,” she says. “But my time there will live on with this show forever!”
Back now with her parents in Fairfield and weighing future options, she’s waiting to see how the reality show will be received.
“I know that I want to be in TV, because I like to create content that makes people happy and makes people think,” she says. “It’s just a matter of what opportunities come.”
Until then, she says, “I’m spending my time relaxing, and it’s really nice. I love Connecticut.”
“BREAKING GREENVILLE” premieres Thursday, Jan. 29, on truTV at 10:30 p.m.
