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Thursday, July 17, 2008
Ashton Kutcher: On the Mogul Trail
Ashton Kutcher
First impressions die hard. But it’s absolutely true that former underwear model Ashton Kutcher, who played the dopiest of the dopes on That ’70s Show, is a certified Hollywood mini-mogul.

Respected for his commercial success as the creator/executive producer of MTV’s Punk’d and CW’s Beauty and the Geek, he’s the head of Katalyst Productions, which has developed a bunch of other TV shows and is now working on viral advertising on the Internet.

His new show on ABC, Opportunity Knocks, sends a whole production crew in a truck to neighborhoods around the country, where it sets up shop and invites the citizens to sit in the audience and cheer on a family selected to Win Big Prizes by answering questions about each other.

Like Beauty and the Geek, it has the potential to be mean, but Kutcher avoids the dark side of family relationships. “This show is not really about breaking up families,” Kutcher said. “It’s about bringing them together.”

“I believe that you always have to have compassion before you have judgment,” he said, “and any time you have judgment without compassion, it will fall apart. You might get a big pop really quick, but I feel like eventually that energy will dissolve, and so we always try to instill some universal compassion into the shows that we do.”

Not that it’s all sweetness and treacle.

“You want the bickering,” Kutcher said. “Like, that's fun. … We don't want people getting divorced over it, but the bickering is fun.”
Posted by Jonathan Storm @ 2:24 PM  Permalink | Post a comment
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