PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
Reality TV is hooking an über-demographic beyond Madison Avenue's wildest dreams: It includes both NPR listeners and NRA members, Prada PhDs and Blatz-swillers in Wranglers, greeters at Wal-Mart and professionals who can decipher Alan Greenspan-speak. This wide viewer pool -- and the endless post-show analysis that goes on at dinner parties, in green rooms, at the office (Will Joe Millionaire really dupe his paramours into believing he's a rich guy living in a $1.7 million dollar spread? Did one really perform in bondage and fetish flicks? Did Trista on Bachelorette lie about her age? ) -- is vaulting the shows into Nielsen-record territory. Last month, Fox's American Idol posted the highest ratings of any show besides sports in the network's history. In essence, this may as well be network crack: Reality TV is fast, cheap, and totally addictive.
The business model is a fix that's already altering the economics of TV programming. Networks are flooding their schedules with sequels to hits like Survivor -- and the episodes cost less than half of what it takes to crank out a single vapid installment of According to Jim. Profitable product placements abound. And now, testy, contract-wielding writers have been sidelined along with Botoxed actresses demanding grapefruit candles in their designer-appointed Airstreams.
BRILLIANT OR DEADLY? By vaulting nobodies into overnight celebrities, these shows appeal to the flip side of America's fascination with stardom: people's secret resentment at being shut out of Hollywood's seven-carat system. Reality TV is revenge for the regular Jane and Joe.
The box's newest killer app is a competitor worthy of the Digital Age, one that can suck back the viewers who were defecting for the Kingdom of KaZaA, downloading music on their Mac G4s while playing The Sims. Invention has now given way to copycatism, (Survivor begets Boot Camp). Now comes saturation -- on talk shows, TV shows like Entertainment Tonight and Extra, and news magazines. Inevitably, a decline-cum-shakeout will occur.
And at what cost? As crack TV's popularity spreads, so does the dueling punditry over whether it's a brilliant new form of spectacle -- the Colosseum updated for the 21st century -- or the entertainment equivalent of the Ebola virus, causing smart, educated people to slough off their good taste in favor of gutter glitter: as in watching an underwear-model-turned-construction worker lie his way into the arms of a scheming, blow-dried gold digger on Fox's Joe Millionaire.
"DRAMALITIES." In one corner are hip academics, already scribbling scholarly essays proclaiming brilliance -- the way Camille Paglia did about Madonna in the '80s. "Dramalities," they say, are satiating people's needs for sanitized gossip, Peeping Tomism, and the pathetic desire to feel superior. The programs' unrehearsed moments are like visual jazz, appealing to the near-universal desire to be on TV in a country where there is no greater achievement.
Fans say something deeper is at work, too. What other show probes the existential question of who we are and whether we can escape our psyches better than the WB's High School Reunion? Seeing Ben the Nerd reincarnated as Ben the Stud is high drama. It's Genesis. It's Faust.
Like the Jerry Springer Show -- a giant advertisement for the futility of infidelity -- reality TV, in the end, often reinforces Sunday School values without the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan sugar. "Yes, these shows are stupid," says Syracuse University media professor Robert Thompson, a fan of the genre. But then, he adds, "Dating is stupid."
WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION. In the opposite corner are those who decry the phenomenon as the fulfillment of Edward R. Murrow's dark prophecy: "This instrument [television] can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box."
Critics call the shows weapons of mass distraction. Pundits contend that the genre is a race to the bottom that, like Hollywood blowup movies and the tubs of popcorn consumed watching them, are causing us to become dumber, fatter, and more disengaged from ourselves and society. We'll probably look back on our fixation with the same revulsion we felt about our Gary Condit Watch just hours before September 11. These are our brains. These are our brains on crack TV.
Even their slim claim to "reality" becomes increasingly flimsy. The more popular the shows, the more they become "fauxality" in their casting and scripting. Nearly every participant now aspires to land an agent. To keep audiences titillated, programmers will have to keep upping the dosage, making the stunts more dangerous, the rejections more brutal. Then someone will get hurt (remember the murder allegedly inspired by The Jenny Jones Show?) -- or win a big lawsuit -- and the genre will fall under harsher scrutiny. But not before someone makes a wad off The Reality Channel.
AVOIDING REALITY. For the TV industry, the obsession with all things real adds up to easy advertising lucre in a disastrous climate, where margins are getting squeezed harder and harder. Still, something far more sickening is going on than any episode of Fear Factor. Masses in both the blue and the red states seem more passionate about this stuff than the latest dispatches from Hans Blix, substituting an obsession with a contrived reality for attention to the all-too-scary global one.
North Korea continues amassing a nuclear cache. The country is on the verge of war. That's reality. But it's not spiking the ratings on prime time.
Conlin, who can't get enough of The Bachelorette, covers culture and workplace issues for BusinessWeek in New York Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.
Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed.
Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video.
To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here.
Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
