Archive for the Reality TV Category

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Bumping The Shark

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Reality TV, Reviews, TV channels, TV Culture, TV History, TV News, Watching TV with tags , , , , , , , , , on August 13, 2014 by Tom Steward

Last week was Shark Week, Discovery’s incredulously popular annual event consisting of 7 days of continuous shark-themed programming, sandwiched neatly inbetween the network’s other 358 days of continuous shark-themed programming. Now in its 27th year, the ripple effect of Shark Week across TV is staggering, with a shoal of cable networks attempting to take a bite out of Discovery’s ratings with concurrent themed programming alternatives created under the fin of Shark Week. While some satirise the inflated phenomenon of Shark Week, others are brazenly capitalising on its currency. Here’s some of the counter-attacks, and a few suggestions for next year:

Jaws Week:

Steven Seagal movie marathon and quality TV gamut-running network AMC showed a Jaws movie every night, a prospect that got increasingly less attractive as the week went on. The appeal of the original movie passes me by, even though I think Spielberg is a great cinematic illusionist (in that he’s tricked people into thinking he’s a good director), but it and its no-frills sequel are both perfectly serviceable potboilers. Jaws 3-D would be a condescend-a-minute romp through the annals of hilariously dated visual gimmicks were it not now the desired look for all of Hollywood’s blockbusters. Jaws: The Revenge is a movie so contrived that even the info button on my cable box couldn’t help but have a pop at its hopeless storyline.

The ghost of Roger Ebert haunts my info button!

The ghost of Roger Ebert haunts my info button!

Snark Week:

Quantitative data-led camp reality and comedy network WEtv spent a week filleting its programming – I’ll stop the sea puns eventualgae – for the snarkiest (‘bitchiest’ in old and perfectly legal tender) cuts to assemble a ‘snark-a-thon’. Re-runs of Roseanne and Will and Grace were predictable but apparently the sunglass-deflected verbal garbage spewed by douchetective Horatio Kane in cold opens of CSI: Miami has been reclaimed as snark. Making use of its rolling reality repertory, the network launched (seemingly in a word document with an unstandardized font) David Tutera’s CELEBrations where the celebrity event planner plans events…for celebrities. Snark is obviously also reality-speak for ‘palindrome’. All this was accompanied by an onscreen ‘snark-o-meter’ because you know how reality TV fans love their maths.

Shart Week:

Comedy Central, a network dedicated to the lifetime incarceration of Jon Stewart, took a break from its correctional duties last week to show some shit, or at least more shit than usual. In one of the more anarchic responses to Shark Week, the network drained its sewer system (also known as Comedy Central before noon) to find the most scatological episodes of its many and clearly-not-that-varied programmes. Not only did they manage to find enough programming to last 7 days from noon to midnight, there were entire episodes on the subject, like South Park’s ‘Mr Hanky, the Christmas Poo’. A great way to dump on Discovery, I maintain that if this isn’t a sign there’s too many men on a network, nothing is.

Jumping the Shart

Jumping the Shart

Sharknado Week:

Probably the closest rival to Shark Week since it primarily airs fictional programming about sharks with no basis in science whatsoever; spelling-free telefantasy network Sy-Fy premiered Sharknado: The Second One, the sequel to its bottom-feeding 2013 original TV movie, and filled out the airwaves with movies of similar or worse quality about sharks and one other thing. It could also have been dubbed ‘Son of Shark Week’ as it’s hard to imagine this monstrosity (and that’s the closest you’ll get to a compliment from me) existing without 25 years of dumb stuff being said about sharks softening up the American public for these pixel-thin piss-takes. As spoof-proof television, it’ll give your sarcasm glands a much-needed rest after a day of Shark Week ‘documentaries’.

Shark Week Alternatives 2015:

TV Land should launch Jump-The-Shark Week where the network only shows re-runs of episodes broadcast after it became impossible to take a show seriously. This would include all the post-lottery win episodes of Roseanne and any Dallas after 1986 starring the ghost of Bobby Ewing. FX can do Stark Week where primetime consists of airings of the Iron Man movies – actually the FX execs can just let nature take its course on this one. The Food Network could run Chard Week featuring all the best appearances of the vegetable in the mystery box on Chopped, including the time someone drizzled it with a gummiworm-infused vinaigrette. The Biography Channel should host Narc Week in which all the interviews with blacked-out faces and altered voices of cops who’ve squealed on the Mafia are edited together and begin to resemble one endless Peter Frampton concert in the dark.

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Memory Box

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Reality TV, TV Criticism, Watching TV with tags , , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2014 by Tom Steward

It occurred to me recently that TV talks to us as if we’re all amnesiacs. Shows are incessantly reminding us of what happened minutes before, when we’re not being previewed we’re being recapped, and flashback has become the bane of television storytelling. Reality shows are the worst culprits, since their heavy-handed narration and editing permits them to insert extraneous references to past events at will. But dramas and comedies can be just as bad. Think about how many devices there are built into the fabric of fictional TV series to remind us about what just happened; ‘Previously On’ segments, duplicated action, flashbacks. Such repetition is almost certain to annoy viewers and make them feel patronised, so why does TV always think it’s addressing Guy Pearce?

Torture and racism, probably.

Torture and racism, probably.

When it comes to reality shows, it’s safe to speculate that there’s an element of killing time here. Visual call-backs are a good way of conserving footage through re-use and along with voiceover re-caps they can easily pad out a show to its allotted time. I often wonder how long reality shows would last if there were no repetitions or duplications. Chopped would probably end before it began! But there are also less cynical motives at play. It’s long been assumed by producers that people watch TV in fits and bursts and they don’t necessarily watch a programme from start to finish. It’s something we critics with our programme-based reviews still don’t really get. But it’s the impulse behind filling viewers in every few minutes.

Much as we would like to think for the sake of art that TV has fulfilled its potential as a serial medium, it’s still pretty much a halfway house between closed and ongoing storytelling. There must still be part-time and sporadic viewers out there or we’d have switched over to continuous storytelling a long time ago, given that it’s a feature common to all the great TV out there. We wouldn’t need to have these concessions to people who’ve missed a few episodes or were out of the room if we were all faithful and attentive viewers. As far as flashback is concerned, somewhere along the line it got mistaken for complex storytelling – even though the truth is the opposite – and the rest is history.

TV memory aids are where good television and quality television clash. It’s good practice to make TV that responds to the fragmented way a lot of us watch it. But all the shows we associate with quality television are about breaking away from that kind of audience spoon-feeding for something that challenges viewers, even their memories. And it goes to show that the type of television we’re always wanting more of and more like in television (The Wire, The Sopranos) is difficult to produce in most contexts. People are paying specifically for HBO so they’re going to watch everything and stick with a series for value alone. You couldn’t do a HBO show in a place with audiences that are constantly drifting in and out.

Of course, there are limits. It often feels like we’re being cheated of new content. Last week The Bachelorette ran a highlights package of its first three weeks in place of a new episode. It will do this again in a special prior to the finale, and then during the Judd Apatow-comedy length finale itself. Most reality show finales are season re-caps. There is a point beyond which you’re pandering to people who have missed some crucial moments and simply taking the piss out of the remaining audience. In this way, such shows are their own worst enemies, offering no reward to long-term viewing except seeing it all over again multiple times. You can’t count on TV viewers wanting nostalgia like an instant coffee powder.

Late-night talk show Conan has a regular bit called ‘Memba This?’ in which sidekick Andy Richter repeatedly asks the question in front of a slideshow of recent viral news images. As with many Conan skits, they’ve distilled how TV works in a matter of minutes. What TV pretends is a ‘trip down memory lane’ is actually a re-cap of things they haven’t had time to forget. Set up as a ‘new comedy bit’, regurgitation is posing as creativity. And when Conan keeps getting heinous news images, it reminds us that these memory aids are actually TV’s way of manipulating the past, not just repeating it. Damn, I’m twenty words short. It occurred to me recently that TV talks to us as if we’re all amnesiacs.

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Channelling History

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Reality TV, TV channels, TV History, Watching TV with tags , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2014 by Tom Steward

Doing television history on TV is a daunting task. It’s hard enough trying to convey how television connects with social and political events of the past, not to mention avoiding ending up saying TV is a ‘window on the world’ (hall-of-mirrors more like) or making it a medium of communication rather than art. And how do you talk about the history of broadcasting without it becoming a dry recital of telecommunications regulation of the kind John Oliver parodies or a series of backslapping celebrity anecdotes? This is before having to package all this into an inevitably narrow television format that’s supposed to have a broad appeal. So I’m not at all surprised that CNN’s The Sixties: Television Comes of Age was a failure but I am surprised that AMC’s Mad Men, a piece of historical fiction with only a passing interest in sixties television, managed to do so much with the idea.

The Sixties: Television Comes a Cropper.

The Sixties: Television Comes a Cropper.

Recently, Jon Stewart has been using rather a lot of his daily timeslot to attack CNN with the kind of scrutiny and vigour the network never exhibits in its news coverage. He’s been forsaking more gratifying targets, such as Fox News, because CNN’s bloated, ignorant and downright incompetent news reporting is such an insult to journalism and yet still poses as a legitimate news outlet, rather than just an extended campaign ad like Fox or MSNBC. The decline in CNN’s journalistic practices seems to be inversely proportionate to the rise of their original documentary films and series. A mixed bag, to be sure, but with some real highlights, like Anthony Bourdain’s myth-busting travelogue Parts Unknown and archaeological verite Our Nixon. Consequently, I was enthused about the network doing a documentary series on America in the sixties and encouraged that the first episode would be about television. So what’s my problem?

Well, first of all, Tom Hanks. Clearly a selling point for the series if the roadside spinning-sign branding of his producer credit is anything to go by, Hanks has also enlisted himself as a talking head for the show. The actor’s irrelevance to his own industry continues into the documentary, with his inarticulate babbling at the camera about his (unprocessed) memories of watching TV as a child which even a Den-of-Geek editor would call fanboyish. I’m not exactly smitten with the talking heads format anyway. From talking to people who’ve done them, it seems that their words aren’t chosen on their own merits but as a grammatical bridge in the programme’s narration. This pretty much does for anyone who might have a critical stance, but the majority of guests worked in sixties television or now work in the industry and are unlikely to offer much in the way of perspective.

But if this were the only problem with the series, you’ll be inclined to forgive since the researchers and editors have done such a masterful and artful job of finding and fitting together footage from sixties’ television shows. After all, there can’t be many clips out there of Orson Welles winding Dean Martin’s head 360 degrees with a handle. I know it’s not the way things are done now but it’s a great shame that the footage wasn’t left to speak for itself, as it really tells its own story and a better one than the narration. The fundamental problem here is that it doesn’t say anything about what it would have been like to watch television in the sixties, or any other time for that matter. We know what people watched, when they watched it, and some of what it was trying to say. But did audiences get it?

Mad Men: Better Than a Documentary

Mad Men: Better Than a Documentary

This is where Mad Men steps in. In the recent mid-season finale, the characters are all trying to catch as much as they can of the ongoing TV coverage of the Moon Landings. Ad executive Peggy has to follow this with a client pitch the morning after men walked on the moon. Struggling for a segue, she – and writer Weiner – manage to distil the essence of the dial and bandwidth-restricted TV viewing of the time as ‘everyone doing the same thing at the same time’. If that weren’t profoundly elegant enough, Peggy goes on to talk about how this rare moment of unity (and possibly television itself) masks the social disharmony of late sixties America. This isn’t even for our benefit, but for that of fast-food executives looking to cash in on a conservative backlash. Any documentary about American TV history is going to have to beat that.

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Reality TV

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Reality TV, TV Criticism, Watching TV with tags , , , , , on May 22, 2014 by Tom Steward

‘This is a true story. The events depicted took place in Minnesota in 2006. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.’

These words appear onscreen before the opening credits of every episode of Fargo (so far) in front of the master shot one sentence at a time, with a gradual fade on the first one which leaves the word ‘true’ alone on the screen for a second. They follow a network warning which also tells viewers how real the show is going to be, but here it is not the veracity of the events depicted in question but the adult nature of its content. First-time viewers will most likely accept these words on face value as they are delivered without a trace of irony in the solemn legalese one expects from such prefixes. Those coming to Fargo from the 1996 Coen Brothers movie on which it is based will probably be in on the joke, if only for the sake of not being fooled twice. They will remember that the movie opened with almost the same words, the only difference being the date which was originally ‘1987’. Most of them will have subsequently discovered that this was in fact a lie…in fact. I doubt the producers of Fargo are counting on people falling for the same trick but choosing to begin each show with a hoax is more than mere homage.

The truth, the whole truth and nothing like the truth.

The truth, the whole truth and nothing like the truth.

The series would have to have been made anticipating viewers instantly finding out about the movie’s hoax from any number of debunking websites and presuming the same of the TV version, or at least assuming fiction until there is evidence to the contrary. As the programme rewards knowledge of the original film by segueing their storylines into a coherent fictional world, we can deduce that if one is bogus, the other is too. The original prefix was clearly designed to convince audiences of its legitimacy, with formal white text on a serious black screen set aside from the dramatic body of the movie. The adaptation more or less tells us the prefix is phoney, reduced to its basic meaning (‘true’) to show us how flimsy and insubstantial it is without the window-dressing of dates and places. Despite all these mitigations, I still can’t help but feel that the producers are clinging to the hope that somebody somewhere will be duped if only because of the longstanding reputation of television as a truth-telling medium. They may be counting on viewers making distinctions between the way TV witnesses events of the world and how movies provide escape from it to get them to buy into the illusion against their better judgement. This could be why we get the prefix week-upon-week rather than at the beginning of the season. Indeed, I hope it has been included in attempt to pull off a hoax against the odds of a multi-platform age of information plenitude.

White Lies.

White Lies.

After all, TV still cares about distinguishing truth from fiction, or at least it pretends to. After carrying us along with a montage-based fiction for an hour, many reality programmes remind us with a straight face that ‘portions of the programme have been edited’, though as we have not seen a reaction taking place in the same shot as the preceding action for the entirety of the episode, we can guess as much. Simply from the self-evident fabrications of what we see, we are as aware that a reality programme is fiction offered as fact as we are that Fargo isn’t and never was a ‘true story’. But reality TV producers aren’t putting up the disclaimers because they think we’re suspicious about the truth of what we see. They’re doing it so as not to be accused of cheating. The disclaimer usually comes with the condition that it applies to parts of the episode ‘not affecting the outcome of the competition’. It’s not being lied to that is the problem, but what we’re being lied to about. In the hierarchy of reality television, making an artificially conceived competition reasonably fair to contestants is more important than representing people fairly. There isn’t anyone specific being lied about it in the Fargo prefix, but by claiming that the events actually happened in a certain place and time, there is a distinct odour of misrepresentation, at least regionally. Maybe Fargo’s built-in self-denials derive more from fear of offence than disillusion with the masquerade.

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Live Another UK

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Behind-The-Scenes, Reality TV, Reviews, Touring TV, TV channels, TV Criticism, TV History, TV News with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 15, 2014 by Tom Steward

Perennial bad penny of television 24 returned to our screens last week, four years after the show’s cancellation, which everyone – other than flagging network Fox it seems – felt was already long overdue. Along with being cut in half (12 must not be a sellable number these days), one of the more remarkable changes to the series, sub-titled Live Another Day, is its re-location to London. In the later years of the series proper, 24 left America’s centre of terrorist activity L.A. to tour the East Coast with seasons seven and eight set in Washington and New York respectively. The show only ever ventured from U.S. shores when its many presidents would harangue middle-eastern statesmen by phone to reveal their country’s official secrets in order to avert a nuclear attack they know nothing about. African-set spin-off TV movie 24: Redemption is the exception here, but everyone concerned would I’m sure like to write that abomination out of the show’s history along with ER’s excursion into the dark continent of television. Besides, 24 was always characterised more by rampant xenophobia than cosmopolitanism. So why on earth would the producers of 24 want to re-launch the series in The Big Smoke?

24 solves mystery of London's traffic problem.

24 solves mystery of London’s traffic problem.

Well, the official explanation is that setting Live Another Day in London pays tribute to the UK TV audiences and critics who championed 24 in its early years when the US was still ambivalent. The first and second seasons of 24 were essential cult viewing when they aired on the free-to-air channel BBC Two in the early 2000s, gaining a large and devoted viewership, incessant national media attention and even a digital BBC sister show in a mould recently revived by AMC’s Talking Dead. The Guardian’s TV critic Charlie Brooker even had to be asked by his editors to stop writing about the show in his weekly column. 24 was lost to the nation as a watercooler show once premium satellite channel Sky One bought the exclusive rights to air the series from season three onwards, but Britain doubtless helped to ensure renewal in the years before the show was a signature Fox mainstay, and became too big to cancel. If this is the case, then speaking for the entirety of the UK – which as an ex-pat I do daily – we’re flattered. But will Britain end up resenting 24 in a manner previously reserved for Dick Van Dyke?

Three episodes in, it’s too early to tell but the signs are encouraging. Live Another Day has so far conspicuously avoided the axis of bobbies, minis and red phone-boxes that still dominates the representation of Britain in American popular culture. Sometimes, it even looks like it was conceived by someone who knows London, or has at least obsessively Google-street-viewed it. The season premiere opened with an East-London street market scene that authentically captured the area’s large Asian population, a fact of our diversity that Americans often miss. Whether or not the Prime Minister would have been a caricature of the privileged classes anyway I’m not sure, but that’s what we currently have, and Stephen Fry’s neckless bumbler is a suitably Cameronesque figure. Apart from some tourist traps like assuming that someone could pursue a Tube train through Central London by driving, the show is pretty faithful to the city’s geography and infrastructure and, at the time of writing, we’ve seen way more of London’s liminal council estates and industrial wastelands than its tourist hardware. We don’t see natives often, but when we do they have the sarcasm and cynicism towards America’s intelligence melodrama that I expect from my fellow Britons.

Jack's in a pickle again!

Jack’s in a pickle again!

Sadly, the cinematographers have CSI’d the show’s colour palette, making London more grey than it actually is, which I didn’t think possible. As revelations about the origin of the attacks unfold, I’m beginning to worry that we’re about to be portrayed as a country that harbours and sympathises with middle-eastern terrorism, rather than one that benignly questions the motives of US foreign wars from time-to-time. Given 24’s scapegoating of anyone East of Alaska, I’m not sure those Asian and Eastern-European Londoners are going to stay innocent bystanders for long. Of course, this London layover is symptomatic of a broader reverse-colonization of American television by UK popular culture, with a quota of British acting in every new show. It comes at a time when Bravo is launching the reality show Ladies of London looking at the city’s transatlantic socialites. As self-appointed visual archive of the rich and famous, Bravo is hardly likely to offer us a London in accordance with social realities. Preview material of a barrow boy speaking entirely in cockney rhyming-slang more or less confirms this. So at a time when American TV is obsessing over Britain without ever attempting to understand it, should we be grateful for Jack?

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