Reality Disappointment
Jun. 13th, 2013 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSo Kimberly and I watch a fair amount of Reality TV. Survivor, The Amazing Race, and The Real World in the regular season; Big Brother in the summer; and Project Runway whenever it shows.
It's low-quality, unscripted TV, but I find it interesting in a number of different ways.
First and foremost, you have the "characters". Reality TV is all about showing people as their unvarnished selves; it thus reveals interesting views of what people are like, and also offers a number of viewpoints that I wouldn't see in my normal life.
Second, reality TV shows are interesting exercises in plot. Given the real-life(ish) footage that they have to work with, how do youtheypresent a show that feels like it's plotted and has an ending that's fulfilling? It's fun to not just watch the process, but also to talk about how a show is being edited and what it means. It's particularly interesting when it becomes obvious that the show didn't have the footage it needed to tell a compelling story (such as in Project Runway 6, when the winner Irina Shabayeva was clearly a great designer but got a kind of an unpleasant edit the whole season) or when the producers of the show seem to massively misunderstand the emotions that an edit will produce (such as in Project Runway 8 and The Real World: Portland, both of which I'm going to return to).
Third, you may note that most of my Reality TV shows are actually game shows, and that's because I find the gameplay intriguing. Both how the show arranges its various challenges to encourage certain types of play and how the contestants in turn try to manipulate that system.
With that said, Reality TV can be dangerous and unsavory too. At least one of my friends widely avoids the genre because he thinks that producers purposefully choose unstable people and put them in purposefully unstable environments. He's certainly in part correct, and even if people are choosing to submerge themselves in the environment, you have to ask some questions about the ethics of the process. As I did with the recently completed Real World: Portland.
But first, let me talk about a few other Reality disappointments.
The Celebrity Apprentice 2 (2009). This was my first great reality disappointment. The Apprentice had started out as an interesting variation of Survivor, where people engaged in business tasks as teams, with one team winning and one team losing. Then Donald Trump figured out who was most at fault from the losing team (by a variety of criteria) and fired him. Good concept, and it mostly worked, though from time to time you questioned Trump's judgement in firing someone.
Then, in 2008 the show turned into Celebrity Apprentice, which was the same idea, but too often about which players could get their friends to pay ridiculous amounts of money for cupcakes (or whatever). Because the focus was on financial aid, almost all the tasks turned into sales, where before there'd been a nice mix of product development, marketing, sales, and other business stuff. Kimberly & I persevered. Then came The Celebrity Apprentice 2 when two of the contestants were friends of Trump's ... and that ended about as well as you'd expect. Trump constantly found reasons not to fire his friends; even after one committed the unforgivable Trump mistake of quitting ... he welcomed her back. And she won against an opponent who had clearly, clearly, clearly been playing the game better. (Among other things: she didn't quit.)
Kimberly & I decided that the game had entirely lost its integrity, and so we pulled it off our Tivo season pass and haven't watched since. And I'm glad we did as I thus didn't have to deal with any cognitive dissonance from Donald Trump turning into a raging asshole, bigot, and conspiracist in the leadup to the 2012 election.
(I'd still love to see the British Apprentice, which we saw part of in 2008 before the financial markets collapsed, and is vastly superior to its American brethren by the lack of Donald Trump.)
Project Runway 8 (2010). This was another show where the clearly superior winner lost. There was actually a really big internet kerfluffle as a result. As far as I can tell, this was because the designer who should have won refused to listen to the advice of two of the judges, and so they refused to let him win. It's hard to say for sure, however, because of course we don't see everything, just the edited and final footage. Unlike in The Celebrity Apprentice, there weren't any obvious reasons that the judges were biased, though they were a bit hypocritical in their advocation of the winner's ready-to-wear looks, even though they'd previously argued for the exact opposite in runway shows.
It could be that this season of the show was just really badly edited, to give too much good attention to the second-place finisher and too much bad attention to the first-place finisher. I mean, that certainly happened, but maybe it was unintentional. Maybe we would have accepted the result otherwise -- but a lot of people certainly didn't as it was. In any case, it didn't make us want stop watching the show. But it sure made us lose some respect for the judges' decisions.
(Which highlights a problem with these judged reality TV shows, I guess.)
The Real World: Portland (2013). And then there was last night's reality TV. To start with, I should admit that I know that the Real World is the absolute bottom of the reality barrel. It's just the (true-ish) story of what happens when 7 people are picked to live in a house together. And they're twenty-somethings, so they drink too much and argue. Nonetheless, it's an interesting character study and it's the main funnel for "cast members" going into The Challenge, a show that's often more interesting because there is competition.
But this season was the worst season of The Real World that I've ever seen. It all centered around one cast member who was clearly outside of the mental norm for society in some way. Most obviously she was a constant liar and manipulator, but she also seemed to have some unsavory desire to always prove she was better than other people, to put them down if they were above their station or something. And she believed that vengeance was hers like she was the Lord, that if someone transgressed, that it was her job to constantly and repeatedly get them back. I'd call her crazy if I knew what the crazy was, but as is I'll just say: extremely poor at playing with others.
The worse problem was that she degenerated over the course of the season, growing more hateful of other cast members and more violent toward them. In the last episode (which we saw last night), she physically assaulted one cast member with a hair drier, smacked another in the back of the head well after the previous argument was over, and then tried to get one of her (non-cast-member) friends to physically assault a third cast member; the friend said that he wanted to shoot said cast member in the head before he was calmed down by a fourth cast member.
Now crazy cast members are a problem in themselves; it's something that Reality TV shows have increasingly cast for as time has gone on, presumably to give their shows more audience appeal. However, what really, really offended me in this most recent season of the Real World was the fact that production never stepped in to do anything about this increasingly violent and (I suppose) crazy cast member. They let the physical violence go on and they also let a situation develop where someone could have been shot and killed.
Kimberly and I were disgusted by the behavior of the violent/crazy cast member, but even moreso by the show's production staff deciding that they'd prefer to let all this go on -- presumably for the ratings. The Real World actually used to be really good about removing people from the show at the second that violence emerged. I was somewhat surprised several years ago when they started letting past violent offenders return for follow-up shows, and now that they don't care at all ... well, I don't care.
So The Real World is either gone or going from our season pass. Its sister show, The Challenge remains, at least for the moment, as they've continued to remove people for violence there as recently as a couple of seasons ago. With Real World gone, either The Challenge or Big Brother is the bottom of our reality TV show bucket; amusingly they each start in about two weeks.
I also emailed a letter to Bunim-Murray Productions, figuring that was the only other way I had to make a difference other than turning off the show. I politely but very bluntly told them I thought they were accessories to crimes who had failed ethically in their behavior.
They mailed me back saying they didn't take unsolicited submissions.
It's low-quality, unscripted TV, but I find it interesting in a number of different ways.
First and foremost, you have the "characters". Reality TV is all about showing people as their unvarnished selves; it thus reveals interesting views of what people are like, and also offers a number of viewpoints that I wouldn't see in my normal life.
Second, reality TV shows are interesting exercises in plot. Given the real-life(ish) footage that they have to work with, how do youtheypresent a show that feels like it's plotted and has an ending that's fulfilling? It's fun to not just watch the process, but also to talk about how a show is being edited and what it means. It's particularly interesting when it becomes obvious that the show didn't have the footage it needed to tell a compelling story (such as in Project Runway 6, when the winner Irina Shabayeva was clearly a great designer but got a kind of an unpleasant edit the whole season) or when the producers of the show seem to massively misunderstand the emotions that an edit will produce (such as in Project Runway 8 and The Real World: Portland, both of which I'm going to return to).
Third, you may note that most of my Reality TV shows are actually game shows, and that's because I find the gameplay intriguing. Both how the show arranges its various challenges to encourage certain types of play and how the contestants in turn try to manipulate that system.
With that said, Reality TV can be dangerous and unsavory too. At least one of my friends widely avoids the genre because he thinks that producers purposefully choose unstable people and put them in purposefully unstable environments. He's certainly in part correct, and even if people are choosing to submerge themselves in the environment, you have to ask some questions about the ethics of the process. As I did with the recently completed Real World: Portland.
But first, let me talk about a few other Reality disappointments.
The Celebrity Apprentice 2 (2009). This was my first great reality disappointment. The Apprentice had started out as an interesting variation of Survivor, where people engaged in business tasks as teams, with one team winning and one team losing. Then Donald Trump figured out who was most at fault from the losing team (by a variety of criteria) and fired him. Good concept, and it mostly worked, though from time to time you questioned Trump's judgement in firing someone.
Then, in 2008 the show turned into Celebrity Apprentice, which was the same idea, but too often about which players could get their friends to pay ridiculous amounts of money for cupcakes (or whatever). Because the focus was on financial aid, almost all the tasks turned into sales, where before there'd been a nice mix of product development, marketing, sales, and other business stuff. Kimberly & I persevered. Then came The Celebrity Apprentice 2 when two of the contestants were friends of Trump's ... and that ended about as well as you'd expect. Trump constantly found reasons not to fire his friends; even after one committed the unforgivable Trump mistake of quitting ... he welcomed her back. And she won against an opponent who had clearly, clearly, clearly been playing the game better. (Among other things: she didn't quit.)
Kimberly & I decided that the game had entirely lost its integrity, and so we pulled it off our Tivo season pass and haven't watched since. And I'm glad we did as I thus didn't have to deal with any cognitive dissonance from Donald Trump turning into a raging asshole, bigot, and conspiracist in the leadup to the 2012 election.
(I'd still love to see the British Apprentice, which we saw part of in 2008 before the financial markets collapsed, and is vastly superior to its American brethren by the lack of Donald Trump.)
Project Runway 8 (2010). This was another show where the clearly superior winner lost. There was actually a really big internet kerfluffle as a result. As far as I can tell, this was because the designer who should have won refused to listen to the advice of two of the judges, and so they refused to let him win. It's hard to say for sure, however, because of course we don't see everything, just the edited and final footage. Unlike in The Celebrity Apprentice, there weren't any obvious reasons that the judges were biased, though they were a bit hypocritical in their advocation of the winner's ready-to-wear looks, even though they'd previously argued for the exact opposite in runway shows.
It could be that this season of the show was just really badly edited, to give too much good attention to the second-place finisher and too much bad attention to the first-place finisher. I mean, that certainly happened, but maybe it was unintentional. Maybe we would have accepted the result otherwise -- but a lot of people certainly didn't as it was. In any case, it didn't make us want stop watching the show. But it sure made us lose some respect for the judges' decisions.
(Which highlights a problem with these judged reality TV shows, I guess.)
The Real World: Portland (2013). And then there was last night's reality TV. To start with, I should admit that I know that the Real World is the absolute bottom of the reality barrel. It's just the (true-ish) story of what happens when 7 people are picked to live in a house together. And they're twenty-somethings, so they drink too much and argue. Nonetheless, it's an interesting character study and it's the main funnel for "cast members" going into The Challenge, a show that's often more interesting because there is competition.
But this season was the worst season of The Real World that I've ever seen. It all centered around one cast member who was clearly outside of the mental norm for society in some way. Most obviously she was a constant liar and manipulator, but she also seemed to have some unsavory desire to always prove she was better than other people, to put them down if they were above their station or something. And she believed that vengeance was hers like she was the Lord, that if someone transgressed, that it was her job to constantly and repeatedly get them back. I'd call her crazy if I knew what the crazy was, but as is I'll just say: extremely poor at playing with others.
The worse problem was that she degenerated over the course of the season, growing more hateful of other cast members and more violent toward them. In the last episode (which we saw last night), she physically assaulted one cast member with a hair drier, smacked another in the back of the head well after the previous argument was over, and then tried to get one of her (non-cast-member) friends to physically assault a third cast member; the friend said that he wanted to shoot said cast member in the head before he was calmed down by a fourth cast member.
Now crazy cast members are a problem in themselves; it's something that Reality TV shows have increasingly cast for as time has gone on, presumably to give their shows more audience appeal. However, what really, really offended me in this most recent season of the Real World was the fact that production never stepped in to do anything about this increasingly violent and (I suppose) crazy cast member. They let the physical violence go on and they also let a situation develop where someone could have been shot and killed.
Kimberly and I were disgusted by the behavior of the violent/crazy cast member, but even moreso by the show's production staff deciding that they'd prefer to let all this go on -- presumably for the ratings. The Real World actually used to be really good about removing people from the show at the second that violence emerged. I was somewhat surprised several years ago when they started letting past violent offenders return for follow-up shows, and now that they don't care at all ... well, I don't care.
So The Real World is either gone or going from our season pass. Its sister show, The Challenge remains, at least for the moment, as they've continued to remove people for violence there as recently as a couple of seasons ago. With Real World gone, either The Challenge or Big Brother is the bottom of our reality TV show bucket; amusingly they each start in about two weeks.
I also emailed a letter to Bunim-Murray Productions, figuring that was the only other way I had to make a difference other than turning off the show. I politely but very bluntly told them I thought they were accessories to crimes who had failed ethically in their behavior.
They mailed me back saying they didn't take unsolicited submissions.