For eight single professional females gathered in Dallas, it truly is holy Wednesday – the evening each week that they gather in one of their houses for the Traveling Bachelorette Party. Munching snacks and passing a wine beverage, they cheer, cry and cackle as their spiritual leader, Trista Rehn, braves heartache, indecision as well as the occasional recitation of bad poetry to choose from among her 25 swains. Yet a thing is unsettling Leah Hudson’s stomach, and it’s not simply the wine. “I hate that we have been sucked into the Hoover vac of reality TV,” says Hudson, 30. “Do we not have anything better to complete rather than to reside vicariously through numerous 15-minute-fame seekers?”
There there is a substance of reality TV’s good results: it truly is normally the one mass-entertainment category that thrives due to its audience’s contempt for it. It makes us really feel tawdry, dirty, cheap – whether it did not, we most likely wouldn’t bother tuning in. As well as in this, for as soon as, the viewers and pundits agree. Just listen to the raves for America’s hottest TV genre:
“The country is gripped by misanthropy!”–New York Observer
“Ridiculous and pernicious! Many sorts of cruelty are passed off as entertainment!”–Washington Post
“So-called reality tv just could be killing the medium!”–San Francisco Chronicle
O.K., we included the exclamation points, however you get the concept. Yes, viewers are tuning straight into Joe Millionaire, The Bachelorette and American Idol by the tens of millions. Yet, in other words Winston Churchill, by no means have so many viewed so considerably TV with so little beneficial to say about it.
Well, that ends here. It could damage reality producers’ marketing plans for a TV critic to say it, but reality TV is, believe it or not, the most effective issue to happen to tv in several years. It’s given the networks water-cooler buzz again; it’s reminded viewers jaded by sitcoms and dramas why TV is usually exciting; and also at its very best, it truly is teaching TV a different way to tell involving human stories.
A few concessions up front. 1st, yes, you know that there is little reality in reality TV: those “intimate” dates, in particular, are staged in front of banks of cameras and sweltering floodlights. But it’s the only phrase we’ve got, and I’m sticking with it. Next, I don’t pretend to defend the indefensible: Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People is not receiving any assist from me. And ultimately, I’m sure that looking at a good well-made reality show with, say, The Simpsons just isn’t purely comparing apples with oranges; it’s comparing onions with washing machines – no reality show can match the intelligence and layers of well-constructed fiction.
On the pure ratings level, the hottest wave of reality hits has worked a sea change for the networks. And has now put them back on the pop-cultural map after losing the buzz conflict to cable tv for ages. Reality shows don’t just simply reach millions of audiences but leave them feeling part of a communal encounter – what network TV does very best, but sitcoms and dramas haven’t done because Seinfeld and Twin Peaks. (Just when was the last time CSI made you call your very best friend or holler back at your TV?) “Reality has verified that network tv is still relevant,” says Mike Fleiss, creator of the Bachelor franchise.
It has sitcom and drama authors praying for any reality bust. “The networks have only so considerably time and resources,” says Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator of Gilmore Girls. “Rather than entirely taking care of persuading the Olsen twins to permit themselves to generally be consumed by bears in prime time, I wish they will concentrate on discovering a thing that will really last.” TV may appear to be in overkill mode, because the networks have registered tons of dating shows, talent searches together with other voyeurfests. And just like an overheated nasdaq, the reality market is bound to correct. But compared with earlier TV reality booms, this one is maintained by a substantial, young audience that grew up on mtv’s The Real Globe and considers reality as reputable as dramas and sitcoms – and that, for the time being, favors it.
And why not? It would be far better to bemoan reality shows’ crowding out sitcoms and dramas when the latter were not in such a rut. Nevertheless the new network shows of fall 2002 had been a creatively timid mass of remakes, bland family comedies and derivative cop dramas. Network executives dubbed them “comfort”–i.e., familiar and boring – TV. Exactly whereas reality TV – refer to it as “discomfort TV”–lives to rattle viewers’ cages. It brings about. It offends. But at least it’s trying to do a thing besides assist you get to sleep. Some new reality concepts are idealistic, like FX’s American Candidate, which aims to field a “people’s candidate” for President in 2004. Other people are lowbrow, like ABC’s The Will (relatives battle for an inheritance), FOX’s Married by America (viewers vote to help pair up a bride and groom) and NBC’s Around the Globe in 80 Dates (American bachelor seeks mates around the globe; after all, how better to improve America’s image than to send a stud to other nations to defile their females?). But all of them make you sit up and pay attention. “I like to make a show exactly where persons say, ‘You can’t put that on TV,’” says Fleiss. “Then I put it on TV.”
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