In TV shows where they rope in everyday people to be part of a program, it would be fun to imagine what would happen if they do not understand how these things are filmed. That Mitchell and Webb Situation does the imagining for us.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
They fired a few shots at those awful home renovation shows too, my favourite being here.
They did a great take on “celebrity chefs” who come bungieing in to make your restaurant better.
Obligatory comment on “reality TV”:
If you watch reality TV shows you’re a scab, crossing the lines at the writer’s union strike. OK, that’s some history but what happened is the writers went on strike and the Hollywood system responded with: unscripted TV. No need for writers. Hey, let’s just have a camera (leave the union camerapeople out, too and use static hidden cameras) and spool sheer human drama at the screen. And the rest, is history. Decades of dreck, in order to fatten the Hollywood fat cats further because why pay a writer for a show when you can pay Joe Rogan $100mn to improvise?
That’s not to say the genre has to be bad. There are some real gems there where they film actual interesting parts of reality instead of stupid petty drama. Like Dirty Jobs. I will never not praise Diety Jobs whenever the subject of reality TV comes up because it is the peak of what the genre should aspire to.
Shit like Bridezilla can go die in a fire. See this train wreck? Watch it crash and burn and feel better about yourself because you think you’re better than that. That’s all it is.
Personally I think M&W’s best piece of work is purely audio -- this bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98CWbGG2DJ0
@mjr, 3:
This presupposes three things -- that we know which writers’ strike you mean, that reality TV was invented in response to it, and by extension that that happened in the USA.
Which writers strike? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hollywood_strikes)
The 2007-2008 strike, that came eight years after Big Brother had premiered on CBS, after the format was invented in the Netherlands?
The longest writers’ strike ever, in 1988, which came four years after “Real People” had stopped airing on NBC?
The 1981 strike, which came three years after the BBC aired “Living in the Past” in which a bunch of hippies went and lived in an Iron Age village for over a year?
The 1973 strike, which came eight years after the premiere of the unscripted “The American Sportsman” on ABC?
There’s not a clear and objective start point for reality TV. Is “Candid Camera” reality TV? There’s no script as such. That’s been going since 1948.
My own opinion is that current reality TV started with Big Brother. That was the one that got everyone talking, that was the one that first flirted with live-streaming to the internet (blurred black and white 240p pictures “streamed” at about 1fps in an era when most people only had dialup!), that was the one that, at least at first, maintained the pretence of being “an experiment” by regularly cutting to analysis by qualified psychologists. And for me, I think when it started BB in the UK was genuinely compelling television, mainly because, as it was an entirely new thing, none of the people involved really knew what they were doing -- including the production crew. The drama that unfolded in that first season did so entirely organically out of the attempted manipulation of others by one of the contestants, and the clear-eyed calling out by the others. Where subsequent seasons, and other shows, failed by comparison was in pursuing tabloid coverage by restricting casting to drama-magnet narcissistic freaks with dreams of a followup career on the telly, instead of the relatively normal crowd of the first two or three seasons, and by provoking them with ever more ridiculous tasks and plying them with alcohol to make flareups more likely.
All of this was predicted with startling accuracy by Nigel Kneale (writer of “Quatermass) in “The Year of the Sex Olympics” in 1968.
#3 Marcus
Really. Hollywood writers are owed a monopoly on entertainment, are they? It is required that all entertainment be scripted, to keep them in the loop?
Basically the same as scripted tv shows then.