Definitely Not the Opera
Long gone are the days when a couple of guys with guitars could go into the family garage, practice for a few months and come out recording super stars. So how do you become a pop music superstar these days? Well, the man who invented In Sync and BackStreet Boys thinks he knows, You audition thousands of eager kids, narrow them down to eight, put them in a house in Florida , work them to death, and then chose five of the eight for the new band - did I forget anything. Oh yes, you make a video of the whole thing and you put it on prime time television every week as a half hour show called The Making of The Band - talk about pre-selling a group.
But all they're doing is taking advantage of our fascination with reality television - television that appears to present "ordinary" people in extraordinary situations - totally unscripted. These shows range from COPS to TRAUMA to MOST DANGEROUS POLICE CHASES - and - well you can fill in the rest.
Movies have reflected our love of reality television recently in two instances: THE TRUMAN SHOW - the story of a man whose whole life - unknown to him but with the collaboration of everyone in his town - is shown live 24 hours a day on television. EDTV - which tells of a man who accepts a lot of money to allow cameras to follow him around all day.
In reality - on the Internet - people are willing to show us every aspect of their lives - for free. Webcams allow us to watch the first baby born on the Internet - preceded by a couple having their first experience of sex live on the Internet. There are even thousands of web sites which consist of nothing more than individuals using their webcams to show us what is going on in their homes or offices 24 hours a day.
Television sees the Internet as a major threat as Hollywood once saw television. While television and the web are destined to become one in the near future - they've tried recently with interactive Who Wants to be a Millionaire? shows and iwon.com giveaways - it will be a while before this happens with any frequency.
Meantime, television needs viewers and so what was probably inevitable has taken place. Reality television has married the other big seller on television - the quiz show.. Both tend to be relatively cheap to produce, make money and get large ratings - Who Wants to be a Millionaire? continues to be number one no matter what the other networks put up against it.
The US was not the first to have such a marriage. In fact it is another instance of US television networks playing catch-up after something succeeds in another country. For 100 days in 1999, on a Dutch TV show called BIG BROTHER, nine people in their early 20's were locked in a house in suburban Amsterdam, their every move, their every dalliance filmed by 83 cameras and broadcast live daily on Dutch television and over the Internet. That's the reality bit.
Then - to make things really interesting - how long can you watch 9 people talk - let's add the quiz show stuff. So they're given mindless tasks like keeping a fire burning for 7 days or learning all of Holland's 90 postal codes - by heart. Every few weeks, the group was to select two of their number for expulsion, and viewers would decide by voting over the Internet which of the two had to go. The prize for the last remaining occupant of the house - $160,000.
And then there's SURVIVOR. CBS - again CBS - this time at the end of May, 2000 - shipwrecked 16 carefully selected people - eight men - eight women - on an island in the South China Sea. They' were there for 39 days. Sixteen back-stabbing castaways trying to win the $1 million prize by outfoxing each other as well as vipers, poisonous plants and other natural perils - all of this captured on 100 cameras by camera crews lurking behind palm fronds and coral reefs.
What is our fascination with this type of television, this peeping tom television? It's easy to see the appeal of this kind of program. It appeals to the voyeur in us. It appears to be unpredictable - so anything can happen, the people can be heroes or heels, humiliated or praised. It is this unresolved tension that makes such shows habit-forming.
As well, we spend less time socializing than in the past. We spend more time at home behind electronic walls - whether it be watching television or on the Internet. And with the Internet, we no longer just watch, we participate. Using an avatar - a virtual reality version of yourself which you create to look like anyone you want - you can enter any number of virtual worlds and take part in everything from ballroom dancing to fighting with gladiators in the Roman coliseum.
But a word of caution - this is television, this is the Internet - this is not reality. If anything it is a creative treatment of actuality. For the most part Reality Televison is Extreme Television - extreme weather, extreme accidents, pets that kill. Thirty years Andy Warhol could get away with putting a camera in front of the Empire State Building for 8 hours and releasing the resulting footage as a film. Just imagine what he'd have to do today to turn that into Reality Television that would sell.