It’s not your imagination, cable TV reality shows are getting more redneck by the day. This Venn diagram comes from this article at New York Magazine’s pop culture blog Vulture, where you can see the full-sized version of the diagram. I guess dwarves and people with lots of kids are out of vogue, since I don’t see any of those on the list.
Our favorite family hour of television is watching “The Amazing Race”, when it is on (which it is at the moment), but we often squabble about the hour leading up to TAR. Some weeks Bridget prevails and we watch “60 Minutes”, some weeks Charlotte prevails and we watch whatever tweeny show is on Disney or Nickelodeon (there’s nothing I really care about watching at that time, so I never prevail). This past Sunday, though, we managed to wind up tuned in to the premiere of “Minute To Win It”, which you probably saw promo-ed to death during the Winter Olympics.
From the promos, and from reading a little bit about it in advance online, I was prepared not to like it, thus I was quite surprised at how much silly fun it was. I am only tolerant of Guy Fieri, the host. He’s annoying as hell on his various Food Network programs but not completely unwatchable like several of their “personalities”, and on this game show he kept his usual “radical dude” shtick to a minimum. The focus stays on the contestants, who have to complete an increasingly difficult series of what I would consider bar tricks. They only have a minute to complete each stunt, and the difficulty of the stunts really ramps up. You can’t help but be caught up in their efforts and the satisfaction of their completions. Unlike other shows we’ve watched that revolve around stunts or physical challenges, nothing we saw seemed deliberately demeaning or humiliating or unnecessarily gross, and everything took some degree of skill and/or a lot of practice to make work.
As we watched the show, I was sure the response would be big — I could easily imagine every bar in America having “Minute To Win It” nights where people would try to complete these same stunts, not to mention the inevitable YouTube videos of people trying them at home, and, of course, the official Wii version of the game (many of the stunts remind me of the mini-games that are included in a lot of Wii titles). But apparently my zeitgeist-sensing abilities are worthless, because it bombed in the ratings, and it REALLY bombed with the TV critics. And according to that first link, the first two episodes (which were the ones shown back-to-back last Sunday) are the only good ones, as the already-gratuitous “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”-like production values apparently get turned up to 11 in later episodes.
Apparently the regular time slot going forward is not 7:00 p.m., but 8:00 p.m., so it conflicts directly with our weekly TAR viewing. TAR, of course, only runs in 12-week blocks, so that’s not a permanent situation, but I get the sense that by the time this particular season of “The Amazing Race” is over, “Minute To Win It” will probably have disappeared, too.
I have never seen a single episode of “American Idol”, and yet I can state with a pretty high degree of certainty that the whole thing is a carefully constructed fantasy version of what really happens in the course of a season’s production. However, I’m surprised that the producers have been able to keep a lid on it after all these years until now. This Daily Beast post by a journalist who has followed the series behind the scenes for several years explores the difference between the actual process and the way it is dramatized on television.
Makes you wonder about the machinations that got The Naked Senator’s daughter, Ayla Brown, so far along.
I know a couple of people who have had their own brushes with reality television. One is a member of a local a-cappella group that auditioned for “America’s Got Talent”, only to get yanked before they even got a shot at being on TV. The producers of that show had gone so far as to shoot profile pieces and start building the narrative bits for them, a sign that they thought the group would go on to make the show. More recently, my cooking-school buddy Jo wound up at the local auditions for an upcoming cooking competition series based on the BBC show “Masterchef” when her cooking school was hired to be an audition location. No monkey business with fake auditions and special treatment for “stars” at that audition, I gather from what Jo has said, just a ton of people all standing in line to show off their cooking.
The show that I would love to see some behind-the-scenes expose about is, you guessed it, The Amazing Race. You gotta know that there a lot more than meets the eye to that show, given how slick the editing is. Some of their machinations are patently obvious, but it seems like the action of the show takes over from that pretty easily…yet, I wonder if that’s just more clever manipulation from the producers. So far, nobody’s telling.
TV watching is a “feast-or-famine” situation for me. I only regularly watch about half a dozen shows, all of which have either limited runs or produce new episodes in small batches. That means that some of the shows I like are only on a couple of times a year, and others I get to watch in six-week clumps then ignore for three months while they repeat over and over. It doesn’t help that a good number of the shows are on the Discovery Channel, which has never met a series it couldn’t run into the ground by airing it four times a day, five days a week.
For those of you just dying to know about my television watching habits, these are the shows I watch regularly: (after the jump)
Television genres come and go. Sitcoms rule the airwaves for a few years, then hour-long crime dramas take over, or doctor shows, or soap operas, or whatever. The current strength of “reality” TV is due in no small part to the surprise success of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, which ushered in a slew of prime time game shows, which had been absent from television since the scandals of the 1950s. The game show craze spawned “Survivor” and “The Bachelor”, both of which were game-like, and so on and so on.
So it was inevitable that another hoary old television genre would work its way back — musical variety shows. If you are over the age of 40, you are old enough to remember at least some of the shows at the tail end of this genre in the late 1960s and 1970s like the last years of the Ed Sullivan Show, or possibly the Smothers Brothers or Carol Burnett. If you’re over the age of 50, you definitely remember those shows and probably a good deal more of them, as there were plenty to go around. TV historians like to say that the TV variety show was “the box they buried vaudeville in” because it was the last venue for that entire style of entertainment.
MIT media professor Henry Jenkins is back at his blog and lets us know that he recently was included in an upcoming PBS series about the history of early television, and wrote this article for the series’ website about the variety show episode. In that article he lays out his claim that the variety show has returned in its 21st century guise as a variation on reality shows; American Idol, America’s Got Talent, Bruno vs. Carrie Ann, etc. are quintessentially variety shows repackaged for contemporary tastes and sensibilities. To make the throwback complete, there are even off-air scandals about rigging, just like the quiz show scandals of yore.
You realize, of course, that this means we’re a bit overdue for the return of the Western. Deadwood did pretty well on HBO, and if they ever resolve the writers’ strike, maybe they’ll work in a few horse operas.
Despite the fainting spell and losing out to Helio and Julianne, I guess Marie Osmond was buoyed enough by her stint on “Dancing With The Stars” to agree to host a “reality” show with her brother Donny and also possibly revive the talk show that they had together back in the 1990s.
I’m a little iffy as to what sort of “reality” show the Osmonds would do. How about “The Polygamist” — a show about a Mormon bachelor who has to decide which six women to marry. Or maybe they can just follow Mitt Romney around for the next year and explain how it is that they all have such perfect hair and teeth.
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