March 6th, 2005 12:00am

By Randy Kennedy

VAIL, Colo. IN a world of ever-proliferating cable television channels, all
trying to attract as many viewers as possible, a group of people
gathered here early one morning on a covered porch of the elegant
Gasthof Gramshammer hotel to do something very strange.

With snow-covered mountains and multimillion-dollar ski homes
shimmering in the distance, they were shooting a live morning talk
show with a distinctly lo-fi, local feel but oddly high-profile
guests: Ryan Sutter, the Vail firefighter better known as the
poetry-writing husband of Trista Rehn, the former prime-time
bachelorette; George N. Gillett Jr., the charismatic owner of the
Montreal Canadiens and founder of a major ski resort company; and
Harry and Susan Frampton, wealthy local real estate developers and
social-circuit regulars.

As the guests chatted with the show's host, the bleary members
of PolyToxic, a Denver rock band, waited to go on. The show's
producers had found the band only a few nights before, playing at
a local club, and the drummer, Chad Johnson, admitted he'd never
even heard of the television channel, Plum TV. He shrugged. "I'm
the drummer," he said. "I only get told things on a need-to-know
basis."

But he should not have been embarrassed. Plum TV is not
television for the many, especially not for shaggy, unfamous
drummers. Instead, it's television for the few - like the
well-heeled, well-connected skiers who pass every winter through
Vail, where the channel went on the air in November. If you're
not one of those people, the only other places in the country
where you can now catch a Plum show are on Nantucket, on Martha's
Vineyard or in the Hamptons, where the channel was started last
year and has its headquarters.

In other words, Plum TV is television for the rich, or at least
the comfortably vacationed. It will be coming soon to Aspen, and
its founders are looking at other places, including Palm Beach,
Fla.; Park City, Utah; Sun Valley, Idaho; and the Napa Valley. In
direct contrast to every other television network, Plum derives
its appeal largely from its exclusivity.

The company's creators - Tom Scott, the founder of Nantucket
Nectars; Cary Woods, a movie producer; and Chris Glowacki, a former
NBC executive - hate the idea of Plum being seen as merely
country-club television. They prefer to describe it as a clever
way to attract big advertising dollars to support good, intelligent
programming for a very discerning audience (many of whose members,
when they are not skiing or clamming or attending charity auctions,
work in the entertainment and media industries). It also seeks to
raise the level of local television for the not-so-rich people who
live in its markets.

But in the few months it has been on the air at its five
locations, the channel has mostly taken shape as a glossier version
of public-access cable for the people who like to see and be seen,
the kind who orbit in many influential circles - and may be
titanically important to certain gossip columnists, but are not
nearly so well known in the world of television for the masses.

In the Hamptons, Patricia Duff, the socialite and ex-wife of
Ronald O. Perelman, is the host of a political talk show. Sophie
Dahl, the model, reads children's stories (including those of her
grandfather, Roald Dahl, whose widow, Patricia Neal, has a house
on Nantucket). Arne Glimcher, the art dealer, has taped a pilot
for an art talk show, interviewing Chuck Close, his friend and one
of the artists he represents. Carly Simon has been a Plum guest
and has expressed interest in creating her own children's show.
And other guests have popped up from various worlds of wealth,
like Russell Simmons, Nicole Miller and Brian L. Roberts, the
chief executive of Comcast, the cable giant.

Mixed in with these luminaries, however, is an unlikely mélange
of local weather and traffic information and faces - lobstermen,
bureaucrats, high school students, the Nantucket harbormaster, a
Hamptons birthday-party magician named Mystic Mickey.

"When you see the morning show on Plum," Mr. Scott said in a
recent interview, "you're going to see the local football coach
come on right after David Halberstam." And the effect is a kind of
virtual social leveling. The locals like to find themselves on
television and get a glimpse of the celebrities in their midst;
the wealthy part-timers, in turn, want to think of themselves as
locals and figure out how to act like them.

"All the visitors are checking out the way the local guy does
it," Mr. Scott said. "What he wears. How he fishes, where he casts.
He's the cool guy. People like the real thing."

Mr. Scott, an earnest, boyish 38-year-old with a fierce
entrepreneurial drive, came up with the idea for the channel in
2002, not long after he sold his stake in Nantucket Nectars, the
juice business he co-founded, and bought Nantucket Television, a
local cable station. He soon brought in Mr. Glowacki, a Nantucket
buddy, and then Mr. Woods, who produced the movies "Swingers"
and "Kids."

Mr. Wood's connection to Mr. Scott would be a strange one for
most business partners: Mr. Woods was the first husband of Mr.
Scott's wife, Emily, who happens to be a co-founder of J. Crew.
(During a recent dinner in Vail, the men struggled to recall a
catchphrase of hers and finally came up with it together.) In
many ways, their odd relationship - Mr. Woods was the one who
set his ex-wife up with Mr. Scott - epitomizes the way Plum
itself draws on the cozy and often unlikely connections among
the rich and famous.

Looking around at his Nantucket neighbors, Mr. Scott recognized
the value of such connections - especially for high-end
advertisers - early on. "It's as wealthy and influential a group
of people as there are in the media," he said. "I mean, we started
looking around at who's here, and it's like 'Wow, look at all these
people.' Now, they weren't our target at Nantucket Nectars. I didn't
think, 'This is a good way to sell Nantucket Nectars.' But I did
think, 'God, it must be a good way to sell Mercedes.' " (Among the
advertisers signed up so far are Merrill Lynch, Volkswagen,
Sentient Jet and - not a big surprise - J. Crew.)

The concept of vacation television was not entirely new. RSN,
formerly known as the Resort Sports Network, has created a national
network of cable affiliates over the last 20 years, mostly in ski
areas, that provide local weather and information and broadcast
mostly outdoor sports and interview shows. While its programming
is largely sports-driven and its target audience is not nearly as
wealthy as Plum's, its experience demonstrated something important
and surprising for any newcomer: in all the resort areas where RSN
is available, it is regularly the most-watched channel, beating the
networks and other cable stations, according to Nielsen Media
Research.

The message? "When you're on vacation," Mr. Woods said, "if
you're going to watch television at all, you're not going to
watch what you watch when you're at home." Jeff Dumais, president
of RSN, said the phenomenon had been crucial to the network's
success. If RSN were just one of a handful of most-watched stations
at its resorts, he said, "we'd be a sort of quaint, nice buy, but
we wouldn't be able to get the kind of ad dollars to stay in
business."

In its ambitions to be more than just eye candy for the rich,
Plum finds itself somewhat torn. Mr. Woods, 47, a onetime William
Morris agent who worked at Miramax before forming his own movie
production company, says he hopes Plum can hook viewers with ski
conditions and famous faces. But he wants to keep them there with
shows better than the ones they would find flipping through the
channels back home - documentaries and independent films and
innovative series that are not simply wealthier versions of E!'s
"Wild On" or MTV's "Cribs."

The channel has broadcast documentaries like "Orwell Rolls in
His Grave," which accuses America's major media companies of
distorting the truth, and "The History of Glamour," an oddball
animated sendup of the New York art and fashion worlds. Not to be
completely left out of the real estate reality craze, it has also
recruited Bob Balaban, the actor and producer, to make a show
called "Bob Builds His Dream House!," about his bumbling efforts
to build a home in Bridgehampton. ("Watch as Bob has a crisis of
confidence and decides to change his window order," the channel's
Web site says.)

Sometimes, the local programming can feel decidedly homemade.
The other morning at the Gasthof Gramshammer, the morning show's
host, Jennifer Coulson, was interviewing Earl Eaton, one of Vail's
founders, but Mr. Eaton, 81, was not exactly in a loquacious mood.
She asked him to retell a story she had heard about the resort's
early days.

"Well, it's a long story," he said, pausing for a long while
and looking generally uninterested in continuing. "I don't know
if you have time."

One question for Plum is how to handle the off-season at its
resorts. Mr. Glowacki acknowledged that it would be a struggle to
stay interesting, but said that the plan was to shift programming
toward local-interest shows, losing some big advertising but
earning more credibility in the area. (The network's usual mix is
about half locally oriented shows and half shows that appear on
all the network's channels.)

But the biggest question for Plum is whether vacationers and
weekenders in beautiful settings really want to spend time in
front of their television sets.

Jage Toba, a British documentarian who has been hired by Plum
to find original programming, said he thinks the trick is shaking
them out of their work-week television stupor with something they
don't expect to see. "Mainstream TV constantly underestimates its
audience," Mr. Toba said. "It's repetitious and formulaic and
endlessly in thrall to advertisers."

But he admitted that he already feels a little pressure from
above, undoubtedly driven by Plum's advertising needs. He said he
had been asked several times already whether he could help develop
a show about weddings, which are huge business in resorts. So far,
he has resisted. "I say it in meetings," he said. "I said it just
this morning: 'I don't have a wedding show. Nobody's shown me a
good wedding show yet. And we shouldn't do it just to do a wedding
show.' "

Mr. Toba sees quite a bit of the same coming through the door
every week. "A lot of people are pitching me celebrities or
parties or Champagne tastings," he said. "And I have to say no.
I say no a lot."

But he is also seeing more good material looking for an audience,
and he is hopeful that Plum's viewers are it.

"I don't believe in rich TV for rich people," Mr. Toba said.
"That's not how I see this. My picture of our viewer is not that
they're richer. It's just that they're smarter."

Correction: March 13, 2005, Sunday:

An article last Sunday about Plum TV, the cable channel that
presents the model Sophie Dahl reading children's stories,
misstated the relationship between her grandparents Roald Dahl
and Patricia Neal. They were divorced; Ms. Neal is not Dahl's
widow. The article also misidentified the island were Ms. Neal
has a house; it is Martha's Vineyard, not Nantucket.