Remember the TV reality show “Making the Band,” which spawned the short-lived boy band O-Town? If you weren’t a 12-year-old girl in 2000, when the show premiered, you might not. Even Sean “Diddy” Combs, who joined the show after its first season, couldn’t make it a bona fide hit.
Nevertheless, the show’s revenue is at the center of a suit pitting the bankruptcy estate of a film production company once run by Lou Pearlman — the infamous boy band manager who is now serving time in prison for orchestrating a $300 million Ponzi scheme — against Viacom, MTV and the Diddy-controlled companies Bad Boy Films and Bad Boy Records. The Pearlman estate claims that Viacom and the Bad Boy companies cheated it out of at least $60 million generated by the Making the Band franchise.
