(originally written for ALARM Magazine in January 2005)
There’s an old saying I often hear repeated around poker tables. It goes something like, “the person who invented gambling was smart, but the person who invented chips was a genius.” A reference to the subtle innovation that turns a good idea into a great idea, this is the essence of Survivor’s role in igniting the reality TV explosion that led television into the 21st century. The person who pitched Survivor was smart, but whoever decided to have them vote each other off the island was a genius.
Since that first fateful season in Borneo, any discussion of reality programming among TV fans is apt to be heated. Common views range from those who despise the whole genre to those who can’t get enough of it. Most people, however, lie somewhere in between. No matter how leery we are of the quality of these shows, it’s often difficult to turn away.
The urge to think of shows like Wife Swap and The Swan as harbingers of the apocalypse is tempting. Fox even has a new show coming called Who’s Your Daddy? wherein a woman who has never met her father must try to pick him from a group of men. Of course, all but one of them are actors trying to convince her that they’re the real deal. Despicable? Maybe. Entertaining? Probably. And while I swear something like this is described almost verbatim in the book of Revelations, let’s try not to panic just yet.
First of all, what do we even mean when we talk about “reality” TV? A nebulous term at best, it can refer to almost anything unscripted, from news to game shows. Lately we’re generally talking about what the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has dubbed “reality competition,” shows like Survivor and The Apprentice. Contestants compete under contrived circumstances, but the action that unfolds is ostensibly “real.”
Though I like the way ATAS has defined the genre for the purposes of recognizing achievement, it’s obviously still somewhat inadequate. Big Brother has more in common with The Real World than it does with Wheel of Fortune, even though Wheel contains the competition element. Shows like The Osbournes and Family Bonds are definitely part of the new era of reality TV, but neither show features contrived circumstances beyond the presence of a camera (the presence a camera alone might make all the difference -- the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to television... but I digress). So, to some extent we’ll have to settle for the logic Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used when confronted with the task of defining pornography. “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
Fine, so we lack a clear definition of the term, but that’s just because the genre is so new, right? Well, not much luck there either. Reality programming is a form as old as television itself. Candid Camera, the grandfather of reality TV, debuted in 1948 and was adapted from Alan Funt’s radio segment, Candid Microphone. Wanted, which aired in the mid 50’s was an early predecessor to America’s Most Wanted. In 1973, PBS aired a ground-breaking (and, as it turns out, massively ahead of it’s time) series called An American Family, which featured the real lives of the Loud family. In case you’re imagining how tame such a series might have been more than 30 years ago, during the season the Louds were nearly divorced and had a son come out of the closet. I think that’s pretty good for 1973.
But, despite the fact that reality television isn’t quite as new as it seems, there is something exciting about its recent surge. At its most basic level, reality TV is a new form of human storytelling. Never before have we been able to construct a narrative in the way that reality television can. To me, this observation alone makes a show as aesthetically crappy as The Rebel Billionaire part of one of the most interesting steps in the evolution of human literature since the birth of the novel.
The structure of most Western literature is rooted in Poetics. A couple of thousand years ago, Aristotle pointed out that good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning should set up and foreshadow the ending, the middle should keep us compelled, and the ending should give us some closure.
A good reality show with a strong narrative will also have these elements, but the difference is how it’s constructed. Rather than an author imagining the entire story arc, producers set up a situation. The situation consists of setting, cast, and some sort of challenge the cast must overcome. Finally, the real construction of the narrative comes in the edit room, where the producers take all the pieces and fit them together.
The final step may be the part that most resembles the work of a traditional author. However, it is the establishment of the setting, cast and challenge that really makes this into a new kind of storytelling. The producers pick a location: Survivor in Thailand, The Real World in Philadelphia, The Apprentice in Manhattan. The cast is almost always chosen carefully to ensure a desired level of tension that fits the tone of the show. Finally, the challenge is what makes the story happen. It can be as complicated and contrived as the tasks laid out on The Road Rules, as simple and repulsive as what Fear Factor contestants are asked to ingest, or as subtle and organic as the challenge set for the cast of Family Bonds: to live this portion of their lives in front of a camera.
The amazing thing about this whole process is that once these pieces are in place, the story emerges naturally. Within the context established by the producers, the interactions and details that bring the story to life unfold with guided spontaneity, like a narrative ant farm.
I’m not saying that The Bachelor is Shakespeare, all I’m saying is that we can’t ignore the possibility that reality TV could produce great art. It’s only a form within the medium of television, and weighing judgment upon a form based on a few years of poor, over-advertised examples is not only logically unsound, it’s positively backwards. Reality television is only a means to tell a story, and I see it as a means that has some really exciting potential. But, it is a means in its infancy, with possibilities we’re just beginning to recognize.
Really, this is a point that applies to all of television, especially for those retro garde hold-outs who take pride in not even owning a television and look down upon those of us who watch a lot of it (or, ahem, those of us who’ve dedicated our careers to taking it seriously). Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are plenty of bad novels, bad films, and bad paintings. Every art form in human history has produced exponentially more crap than gold. Think about how idiotic it would be to say, “sculpture is terrible” or “you know what I hate? Drawings.”
There is certainly an overabundance of terrible reality television right now. Not only is a lot of it trash, a good deal of the concepts seem to be leading society into the pages of a dystopian sci-fi novel. Let’s face it, if you took a handful of today’s reality shows and put them in a blender you could concoct a program that would make The Running Man look like The Gong Show. But, I’m an optimist and I think these are the growing pains of a form that has yet to find its Michaelangelos, its Charlie Parkers, or its Orson Welles. So, let’s dispense with the generalizations and start looking at reality tv the way we judge other art forms, one piece at a time.
There’s an old saying I often hear repeated around poker tables. It goes something like, “the person who invented gambling was smart, but the person who invented chips was a genius.” A reference to the subtle innovation that turns a good idea into a great idea, this is the essence of Survivor’s role in igniting the reality TV explosion that led television into the 21st century. The person who pitched Survivor was smart, but whoever decided to have them vote each other off the island was a genius.
Since that first fateful season in Borneo, any discussion of reality programming among TV fans is apt to be heated. Common views range from those who despise the whole genre to those who can’t get enough of it. Most people, however, lie somewhere in between. No matter how leery we are of the quality of these shows, it’s often difficult to turn away.
The urge to think of shows like Wife Swap and The Swan as harbingers of the apocalypse is tempting. Fox even has a new show coming called Who’s Your Daddy? wherein a woman who has never met her father must try to pick him from a group of men. Of course, all but one of them are actors trying to convince her that they’re the real deal. Despicable? Maybe. Entertaining? Probably. And while I swear something like this is described almost verbatim in the book of Revelations, let’s try not to panic just yet.
First of all, what do we even mean when we talk about “reality” TV? A nebulous term at best, it can refer to almost anything unscripted, from news to game shows. Lately we’re generally talking about what the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has dubbed “reality competition,” shows like Survivor and The Apprentice. Contestants compete under contrived circumstances, but the action that unfolds is ostensibly “real.”
Though I like the way ATAS has defined the genre for the purposes of recognizing achievement, it’s obviously still somewhat inadequate. Big Brother has more in common with The Real World than it does with Wheel of Fortune, even though Wheel contains the competition element. Shows like The Osbournes and Family Bonds are definitely part of the new era of reality TV, but neither show features contrived circumstances beyond the presence of a camera (the presence a camera alone might make all the difference -- the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to television... but I digress). So, to some extent we’ll have to settle for the logic Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used when confronted with the task of defining pornography. “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
Fine, so we lack a clear definition of the term, but that’s just because the genre is so new, right? Well, not much luck there either. Reality programming is a form as old as television itself. Candid Camera, the grandfather of reality TV, debuted in 1948 and was adapted from Alan Funt’s radio segment, Candid Microphone. Wanted, which aired in the mid 50’s was an early predecessor to America’s Most Wanted. In 1973, PBS aired a ground-breaking (and, as it turns out, massively ahead of it’s time) series called An American Family, which featured the real lives of the Loud family. In case you’re imagining how tame such a series might have been more than 30 years ago, during the season the Louds were nearly divorced and had a son come out of the closet. I think that’s pretty good for 1973.
But, despite the fact that reality television isn’t quite as new as it seems, there is something exciting about its recent surge. At its most basic level, reality TV is a new form of human storytelling. Never before have we been able to construct a narrative in the way that reality television can. To me, this observation alone makes a show as aesthetically crappy as The Rebel Billionaire part of one of the most interesting steps in the evolution of human literature since the birth of the novel.
The structure of most Western literature is rooted in Poetics. A couple of thousand years ago, Aristotle pointed out that good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning should set up and foreshadow the ending, the middle should keep us compelled, and the ending should give us some closure.
A good reality show with a strong narrative will also have these elements, but the difference is how it’s constructed. Rather than an author imagining the entire story arc, producers set up a situation. The situation consists of setting, cast, and some sort of challenge the cast must overcome. Finally, the real construction of the narrative comes in the edit room, where the producers take all the pieces and fit them together.
The final step may be the part that most resembles the work of a traditional author. However, it is the establishment of the setting, cast and challenge that really makes this into a new kind of storytelling. The producers pick a location: Survivor in Thailand, The Real World in Philadelphia, The Apprentice in Manhattan. The cast is almost always chosen carefully to ensure a desired level of tension that fits the tone of the show. Finally, the challenge is what makes the story happen. It can be as complicated and contrived as the tasks laid out on The Road Rules, as simple and repulsive as what Fear Factor contestants are asked to ingest, or as subtle and organic as the challenge set for the cast of Family Bonds: to live this portion of their lives in front of a camera.
The amazing thing about this whole process is that once these pieces are in place, the story emerges naturally. Within the context established by the producers, the interactions and details that bring the story to life unfold with guided spontaneity, like a narrative ant farm.
I’m not saying that The Bachelor is Shakespeare, all I’m saying is that we can’t ignore the possibility that reality TV could produce great art. It’s only a form within the medium of television, and weighing judgment upon a form based on a few years of poor, over-advertised examples is not only logically unsound, it’s positively backwards. Reality television is only a means to tell a story, and I see it as a means that has some really exciting potential. But, it is a means in its infancy, with possibilities we’re just beginning to recognize.
Really, this is a point that applies to all of television, especially for those retro garde hold-outs who take pride in not even owning a television and look down upon those of us who watch a lot of it (or, ahem, those of us who’ve dedicated our careers to taking it seriously). Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are plenty of bad novels, bad films, and bad paintings. Every art form in human history has produced exponentially more crap than gold. Think about how idiotic it would be to say, “sculpture is terrible” or “you know what I hate? Drawings.”
There is certainly an overabundance of terrible reality television right now. Not only is a lot of it trash, a good deal of the concepts seem to be leading society into the pages of a dystopian sci-fi novel. Let’s face it, if you took a handful of today’s reality shows and put them in a blender you could concoct a program that would make The Running Man look like The Gong Show. But, I’m an optimist and I think these are the growing pains of a form that has yet to find its Michaelangelos, its Charlie Parkers, or its Orson Welles. So, let’s dispense with the generalizations and start looking at reality tv the way we judge other art forms, one piece at a time.
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