Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (6 page)

Other hits like
TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes
, featuring film and television outtakes intermingled with elaborate
Candid Camera-
like pranks played on celebrities, came and went with great ratings success. Reality shows, it seemed, were everywhere, though no one could have foreseen just how much more saturated the market would soon become.

While Reality programming had certainly proven its popularity, there was nothing to prepare viewers or the entertainment industry itself for the boom triggered by the 1988 Writers’ Guild of America Strike, arguably ground zero for the explosion of Reality Television that still reverberates today.

At the time of the strike, Reality shows were the networks’ only option for getting fresh content on the air, generating demand for shows like John Langley and Malcolm Barbour’s gritty and long-running
COPS
, which made its debut in 1989. What could be more thrilling and less expensive to shoot than following cops and crooks around with a camera?

While
COPS
stormed the turf of traditionally scripted drama,
America’s Funniest Home Videos
made a comic splash when it blasted into living rooms the same year on the ABC network.
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, from Executive Producer Vin Di Bona, went a step further than
COPS
with an even bolder premise: Anyone with a video camera pointed on them in the right place at the right time could be a star, and a hilarious family-friendly comedy program could be constructed from viewer sub-missions alone.

Just think about that business model for a moment… an hour of primetime television comprised primarily of viewer-submitted material.

While the format was adapted from an existing show in Japan, Di Bona made it his own with the help of host Bob Saget, whose running commentary on the videos and in-studio audience interactions served to make the content even funnier.

Audiences went nuts for the new wave of Reality programming, even as the networks began to fall hard for the cheap fix Reality shows provided them. Even the biggest Reality shows of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s cost a fraction of what networks had spent on star-driven sitcoms and dramas. Reality show participants could be wrangled at a cost barely north of a baked potato and a handshake at a time when major stars could cost producers sixty, seventy, even a hundred thousand dollars an episode.

When Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray premiered their strangers in-a-house Reality series
The Real World
on MTV in 1992, they credited
An American Family
as their inspiration.
The Real World
, whose inaugural season filled a massive New York co-op apartment with young strangers, was a breakout smash. The opening narrative for the show spelled out its thesis: “This is the true story… of eight strangers… picked to live in a house… work together and have their lives taped… to find out what happens… when people stop being polite… and start getting real…
The Real World
.”

The Real World
quickly became a touchstone for a generation of younger viewers who weren’t even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes when
An American Family
made its debut and who weren’t finding themselves represented accurately in most sitcoms or dramas of the era. The series was also credited with introducing the “confessional” device often seen thereafter in contemporary American Reality series.
⁸
In confessionals, participants are encouraged to keep private video journals and self-document their thoughts and feelings on camera in a safe area, removed from cast mates and crew.

Concerns that the show could not be brought back for a second season due to the slim likelihood of retaining a cast of non-actors were met with an ingenious response from producers Bunim and Murray: A new cast in a new location each subsequent year would ensure that the drama would always remain fresh.

The Real World
’s second season, set in Los Angeles, was arguably an even bigger hit with audiences, and by season three, when a San Francisco home was populated with castmembers like the irrepressible bike messenger Puck and HIV-positive gay activist Pedro Zamora, the show truly hit its stride as the new gold standard for youth-oriented Reality programming. As of this printing, the show has survived 24 seasons on MTV and has been renewed for two more, making it the longest-running program in the network’s history.

Niche-interest basic cable channels grew in number throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s, buoyed substantially by lower-cost models with lifestyle and home improvement Reality shows that could be run repeatedly for weeks, months, even years at a time before going stale. Do-it-yourself home renovation shows, like the ones discussed at the top of this book, had a shelf life that stayed fresh as long as consumer taste in flooring and window treatments remained stable. If those didn’t change every few years, the shows could theoretically repeat over and over until someone came along and reinvented wood, glue and nails.

The big networks, rapidly losing market share to basic cable, joyously milked new cash cows like
Survivor
and
The Amazing Race,
shows that far outperformed much of their scripted competition while simultaneously relieving some of the financial strain the networks were feeling.

Contemporary Reality

Reality Television marches on, with scores of new titles cropping up every year. Scholars and critics are coming to grips with the fact that the medium isn’t about to fade away and is now worthy of critical discussion rather than simple dismissal. Yes, more than a half-century after
Candid Camera
, the genre has finally managed to establish itself as more than a fad to be endured. So pervasive is Reality Television in today’s broadcast universe that in 2003, Les Moonves, President of the CBS Network, informed the
New York Times
that “The world as we knew it is over.” He should know — he’s the executive who opened the door to Mark Burnett and
Survivor
.

American Idol
, the 2002 FOX spinoff of the popular British show
Pop Idol
, has bolstered creator Simon Fuller’s bank account immeasurably while dominating the ratings as the most-watched show of 2004 to 2010.
⁹

That’s a record-breaking grip on the top spot that topples the winning streaks of even legendary scripted programs like
I Love Lucy
(Number One from 1952-1955),
All in the Family
(Number One from 1971 to 1976), and
The Cosby Show
(Number One from 1985 to 1990).

As a matter of fact, as this book is being written, more than half of all scheduled shows
¹⁰
and half of the top ten highest-rated (most viewed) series on air
¹¹
are Reality shows. Many of them run two seasons a year to satiate fan demand, and entire cable networks are devoted to broadcasting new and old Reality programs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year.

Reality continues to mutate as the years roll by, and whether it’s to your delight or chagrin, you can’t kill it with a stick. Along the way, though, there have been plenty of misfires between hits… and an abundance of critical backlash.

Criticisms of the Genre

“What you’re watching is an amateur production of nothing.” —
Dana Gould, comedian
¹²

Aside from the legions of justifiably peeved comedy and drama writers displaced by Reality content’s encroachment onto their turf, many critics deride Reality TV as mind-numbing junk. In many cases, I agree with them — but I also believe that it’s wrong to assume that it’s all garbage.

What I personally find so amusing about the critics who compulsively tilt at Reality TV like Don Quixote to a windmill is the dual standard by which they judge Reality against other genres.

Some of them complain about Reality’s almost uniformly beautiful cast members while simultaneously giving a pass to the gorgeous casts of shows like
Friends
or
Gossip Girl
. Others moan about the genre’s unbelievable situations and setups… you know, because a bunch of celebrities hosting a backyard talent show on
The Surreal Life
is so much more farfetched than that
Star Trek
episode where The U.S.S. Enterprise finds itself awash in self-replicating, faceless, purring throw-pillows called “tribbles.? Many critics also feel sure that the numbskulls who turn up to participate in Reality shows are somehow affecting viewers’ own behavior with their immoral, anything-for-fame antics. It’s perfectly acceptable to those same critics, however, for a scripted show to present a sympathetic serial killer like
Dexter,
a sex-addled writer like David Duchovny’s character in
Californication,
or a meth-selling high school science teacher as played to perfection by Bryan Cranston on
Breaking Bad.
Again, though, the moment a booze-fueled fight spirals out of control on
Jersey Shore,
it’s practically the end of the civilized world.

To that sort of criticism, Professor Henry Jenkins, while Director of Contemporary Media Studies at MIT in 2005, commented, “Don’t look at the characters on Reality TV, look at the audience usage of those characters. Contemptible behavior, even if successful, is still condemned by an increasingly participatory audience.”
¹³

Another common belief among critics is that the success of Reality Television depends on the lowest common denominator of viewers tuning in. Not so. Witness the success of cable’s Bravo network, home to
Flipping Out
,
The Real Housewives of New York
and
Bethenny Getting Married?
among other recent hits. Bravo’s sponsors have flocked to the network for years to access their statistically affluent, educated audience… an audience that just happens to love Reality shows.

Product placement and integration
¹⁴
in Reality Television also raises the ire of critics. In recent years, shows like
The Apprentice
have served up challenges that incorporate sponsors like Domino’s Pizza even as pizza-adverse contestants on
The Biggest Loser
chomp away on Subway sandwiches and Extra sugar-free gum. Product overload can be seriously distracting, but is it really any more distracting than seeing these products written into successful traditionally scripted shows? In 2007, sitcom creator Phil Rosenthal (
Everybody Loves Raymond
) testified before the Telecommunications Subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee (on behalf of the Writers Guild of America West and the Screen Actors Guild) regarding the pervasiveness of product integration and its impact on story. Phil hilariously summarized, by screening a string of clips, a storyline on the scripted series
Seventh Heaven
in which characters relentlessly plugged Oreo cookies right up to the moment one character proposed to another by presented his beloved with a wedding ring —concealed
inside
an Oreo cookie.

For all of Reality’s faults, I still liken critics who blanketly bash it while favoring sitcoms and dramas to wine snobs who can’t just enjoy an orange soda now and then. Good Reality TV rivals the best traditionally scripted television for entertainment value, and its positive impact on popular culture can be felt just as deeply, if not more so, than its negative.

Okay, I can sense that I’m going to have to sell you on that one.

Consider the number of people emboldened by shows like
The Biggest

Loser
to make positive changes in their lives. The popular Reveille series for NBC started a national movement to get in shape that echoed across America, making heroes (and moguls) of personal trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels. While the show has been taken to task by critics for its wall-to-wall product placement, one can hardly argue that any other show in recent history has done so much measurable good for viewers.

Also worthy of note is Reality Television’s lead role in broadening minority representation on television. Reality shows typically sample a far larger ethnic base than scripted television; one need go no further than shows like
Big Brother
or, again,
The Biggest Loser
, to support that claim. One of my favorite shows in recent years is
RuPaul’s Drag Race,
in which a number of hopefuls compete to become the next drag superstar in a brilliantly innovative competition presided over by legendary drag performer RuPaul. A show of this kind couldn’t have existed on television mere decades before, when LGBT performers were simply told that “gays have no place on television”
¹⁵
and Lance Loud was considered an on-screen anomaly.

While criticism of Reality Television continues to trend toward the negative, my take on the stacks of lousy reviews it generates is this — well-executed story with engaging characters and surprising turns should be offered immunity to preconceived prejudices against a genre that’s already spent its entire life being lambasted as a critical “less than.”

Sure, a lot of what’s on is downright distasteful, poorly executed, and dimwitted, but can’t you say the same thing about gross-out, male-driven sitcoms and ripped-from-the-headlines past-their-prime legal shows?

Come on, critics — start playing fair.