CNBC Turns Its Cameras on Adult Entertainment Business

CYBERSPACE—The adult entertainment industry will soon come under examination by one of cable TV’s leading business news networks, CNBC, which plans to take a deep dive into porn and its offshoot endeavors in a new “docu-series” announced this week at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, California. The twice-yearly, two-week event attended by about 200 journalists who cover the television broadcasting industry is where networks often announce upcoming projects and series, even those that remain far from their on-air debuts. The CNBC series exploring “the business of sex” does not yet have a premiere date—or even a title. But according to reports out of the TCA event in Pasadena, the series will range broadly across the adult entertainment field, with reports focusing on the online porn business, strip clubs and the sex toy product industry, among other areas of the adult industry. The project is part of an ongoing CNBC effort to pull in viewers from a younger demographic, according to the cable network’s executive vice president Jim Ackerman. “The world of business will always be a great backdrop for storytelling, and we’re committed to serving up more titles and characters that capture the entrepreneurial spirit in all of us,” Ackerman said in a statement announcing CNBC’s upcoming slate, including the planned sex business series. The sex series is part of a slate of upcoming projects for CNBC that take a softer look at the world of business, including a show about teenagers who want to forgo their college educations, instead persuading their parents to take the money from their college funds and pour it into the kids’ start-up companies. The CNBC sex business series will be produced by the Culver City, California-based production company the Intellectual Property Corporation, whose best known recent project is the A&E cable docu-series exposé on the controversial Church of Scientology, Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. The company is also responsible for the Showtime docu-series Active Shooter: America Under Fire, in which each episode chronicles a different mass shooting situation.