Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (8 page)

Other crossovers into the Reality-Competition universe have included
House Rules
for TBS, in which three married couples renovated different areas of three project homes each week in a bid to win the deed to the property they’d been assigned to.

Dating

No-brainer here. Boy meets girl, boy meets boy, girl meets girl, and drama revolves around whether they hit it off or not. Examples of this type of program include
The Dating Game, Blind Date,
and
Love Connection
.

Reality-Competition hybridizations most notably include Mike Fleiss’ ABC juggernauts
The Bachelor
and
The Bachelorette,
which present a single man or woman the opportunity to select a mate from some two dozen hopefuls looking for love — complete with the now-infamous “rose ceremonies” that eliminate ladies and fellas along the way. While the prize is only love (and sometimes one heckuva ring), it’s probably the most successful Dating/Reality-Competition hybrid in American television history.

The popular Japanese series
Ainori
, which lasted an astonishing 400 episodes, even had an element of travel built in as romantic hopefuls traversed the globe in a pink bus, trying to hook up with each other without getting the boot by pledging their love and then having it go unrequited.

Hidden Camera / Surveillance / Amateur Content

Likely the oldest strain of “reality” on television, what started with
Candid Camera
has evolved into shows like
Punk’d, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment
, and
Scare Tactics
. The goal is always the same — capture natural reactions from unwitting participants placed in unusual situations.

Lumped in with hidden camera programs are clip shows that rely heavily on surveillance or amateur bystander video for material.
The Smoking Gun Presents: World’s Dumbest…
and
When Animals Attack!
are good examples.

As with all other genres, there’s always a great Reality-Competition hybrid example. The best of the best in this category is
America’s Funniest Home Videos
. With more than twenty seasons completed since its 1990 debut (1989 if you want to count the one-hour special that birthed the series), this monster hit for ABC invites viewers to submit funny home videos for a chance to win substantial cash prizes. With spinoffs around the globe, the biggest cash prize probably belongs to the show’s affable Executive Producer, Vin Di Bona, who had the good sense to import and tweak the already-successful format from Japan.

While there is often a hidden camera feel behind shows in the supernatural genre (which we’re about to get to), I wouldn’t lump them in under this heading.

Supernatural

While most often represented by investigative things-that-go-bump-in-the-night shows like
Ghost Hunters
or
Paranormal State,
supernatural shows may also feature anything from cryptozoology (the study of unclassified beasties like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster) to psychics.

Most supernatural Reality shows can be traced back to MTV’s 2000-2002 series
Fear
, which to my thinking always owed a debt to the 1999 theatrical film
The Blair Witch Project
for its aesthetic — shaky handheld cameras and plenty of fixed night-vision stashcams.
⁵

The magnificent
In Search Of…,
which ran from 1976 to 1982, often documented subjects as diverse as Bigfoot and UFOs, though its frequent focus on mysterious historical figures (the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, for example) might call its classification as a purely supernatural series into question. Me, I grant it a pass for mystery.

Travel / Aspirational

With the average American’s work schedule, television shows are as close as some of us will ever get to spending weeks at a time in exotic destinations halfway around the world. Most of us probably won’t find ourselves driving Aston Martins or spending thousands of dollars on bejeweled handbags either. For us housebound types with anemic checkbooks, there will always be Travel/Aspirational shows to let us experience the globetrotting good life, if only vicariously.

The terms “travel” and “aspirational” aren’t always married… for every
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
or
How’d You Get So Rich?
, there’s a show like
Rick Steve’s Europe
or Huell Hauser’s
California’s Gold,
where your host goes sightseeing without dropping too much loot along the way.

Well, there’s your list. At least,
my
list. Happy now?

Notes:

1. In addition to an unrelated consensus that The Smokehouse Restaurant, across from the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, does indeed have the world’s greatest garlic bread

2. Sometimes also referred to as a Docu-Soap.

3. In its 2010 series finale,
The Hills
ended with a crane shot reveal of a castmember standing in front of a backdrop on a studio lot as it was being wheeled away. Depending on your interpretation, this was either a nod to the show’s staginess or a far-out joke at the expense of those who claim the show was scripted.

4.
The View
, American Broadcasting Company.

5. A remotely operated camera providing high, wide coverage; in some instances, a hidden stationary camera.

How Reality Has Changed Traditionally Scripted Shows

As a child of the ‘70s and ‘80s, I handily recall the delightful goofiness of the kind of primetime traditionally scripted shows Americans tuned it to see.

A short list of favorites would include:

ALF:
Short for “Alien Life Force,” Alf was a brown, black-eyed, cat-eating alien puppet that somehow came to reside with the Tanners, an All-American family, until his spacecraft could be repaired. Each week he’d create some new inconvenience for the family while attempting to avoid being discovered.

Knight Rider
: Leather-jacket-clad hunk David Hasselhoff was partnered with “KITT,” a sentient crime-fighting Trans Am. “Sentient crime fighting Trans Am,” by the way, is a nice way of rephrasing the slightly sillier term “talking car.” My favorite episodes as a kid were the ones where Hasselhoff plays his own arch nemesis, a guy who drives a talking car called (what else) “KARR.”

The Dukes of Hazzard
: Brothers Bo and Luke Duke thwarted the ongoing schemes of crooked and corpulent politician Boss Hogg in Hazzard County. Somehow, almost any problem could be solved by causing local Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane or deputies Enos and Cletus to smash up their police cars in pursuit of the boys as they sped around the countryside in an orange Dodge Charger. For a rural area, their county budget for law enforcement vehicles was astonishing.

Try to find that kind of fun, escapist lunacy on network television today.

It’s my belief that Reality Television put a huge damper on the public’s appetite for whimsical and fantastic primetime network television. After Reality TV’s “big bang” in 1988, audiences gradually developed a taste for authenticity that shows like
ALF
,
Knight Rider
, and
The Dukes of Hazzard
could never deliver.

Skeptical of that assessment? Attempts to resurrect the ‘70s classic
The Bionic Woman
in 2007 and
Knight Rider
in 2008 failed miserably with a new generation of viewers already raised on the kind of realism afforded by the new generation of Reality-flavored scripted shows, and even fresh material like Bryan Fuller’s
Pushing Daisies
(a personal favorite about a piemaker who could bring back the dead for 60 seconds with a single touch) didn’t last more than a couple of seasons.

While the examples I’ve cited were mostly far-out fantasy fare, there was plenty of serious drama around in the ‘80s, too. Steven Bochco’s police drama
Hill Street Blues
was an enormous success, as was his
NYPD Blue
(co-created with David Milch). But neither was immune to the touch of Reality Television.

John Wells, writer, producer and two-time president of the Writers Guild of America West, recently shared with me that as a younger man, he was fascinated by the gritty realism of Bochco’s police dramas until the boom in Reality TV. Suddenly, thanks to
COPS
, he could watch real police officers at work instead of fictional ones; and while his favorite police shows remained brilliantly executed classics, the shine of gritty authenticity they once wore was gone for him. With the dawn of contemporary Reality Television, John realized that scripted programming would have to work harder to emulate “reality” if viewers were to be expected to invest in it emotionally.

That realization served him well just a short while later when he was asked to adapt a screenplay by Michael Crichton into a television pilot for Steven Spielberg. The long-running result,
E.R.
, premiered on NBC in 1994. The scripted, ultra-realistic medical drama set in a Chicago hospital’s emergency room soon became an ideal case study in how modern Reality Television’s influence has permeated the sphere of traditionally scripted TV.

E.R.
featured more gruesomely realistic portrayals of injuries, violence and chaos than had ever been seen on network television before. The show’s dialogue was less about tossing clever
bon mots
and zingers around than allowing characters to interact more naturally. Every chaotic moment was rendered in frenetically paced “reality” style, with brisk editing and cameras in almost constant motion.

The change wasn’t limited to medical dramas. Police procedurals also grew darker and more graphic in striving to achieve heightened realism, and by the year 2000, you could tune in to
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
and see mangled corpses being combed over for evidence and crime scenes so vivid they shocked viewers even more than the operations on
E.R
..

Now don’t get the impression that all Reality has brought to the table is a shooting style and some gory blood-and-guts effects here and there. It’s also dramatically changed the business end of scripted television as well.

With the exception of a lull in production during the aftermath of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, when some networks grew skittish that we’d all had an overdose of “reality” and needed a break from it on television,
¹
Reality programming has continued to wrestle more and more airtime away from traditionally scripted shows.

With fewer and fewer shows in production, sitcoms and dramas struggle to remain competitive, viable alternatives to Reality. In their favor, there’s always the rare and rewarding jackpot scenario in which they survive a long enough run that they can then be syndicated for years, amortizing their hefty upfront costs over longer runs on the tail end. Even so, since those big wins are rare, traditionally scripted shows have learned to stay light on their feet fiscally, as evidenced by stellar shoestring-budget cable shows like FX’s cop drama
The Shield
and comedy series
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

The Reality Genre as Fodder for
Traditionally Scripted Television

The “mockumentary”
²
style, expertly utilized by Ricky Gervais in his 2001 BBC comedy series
The Office
, echoes Reality TV with its frequent breaking of the fourth wall both through an in-scene awareness of camera and interview cutaways. While mockumentaries are nothing new (Rob Reiner’s 1984 film
This Is Spinal Tap
went a long way toward popularizing the genre), their recent proliferation may well be the most visible evidence of America’s obsession with Reality TV.