Reality Tv Seems To Dominate
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Reality Tv Seems To Dominate
The Real World: is reality TV finally in decline?
The Real Housewives of Orange County: original reality stars. Photograph: Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
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More than 20 years on, and with viewing figures starting to falter, is reality TV losing its grip on primetime television?
The Real World, the pioneer of the American reality TV phenomenon as we know it, will be 23 years old in 2015. Yet the fact that the show, inspired by the innocuous and wholesome docu-series An American Family, that aired on PBS in 1973, has been such a stalwart of the reality landscape speaks to the problems currently facing the genre. Ratings have taken an undeniable dip and that’s been reflected in programming scheduling where reality shows have been pared back. Reality TV is showing its age and losing its luster – fast.
Two of the primary factors diluting viewers’ interest in the guilty-pleasure genre are redundancy and lack of innovation. It’s not just The Real World that’s been on the air longer than the lifespans of many millenials. American Idol, Fox’s primetime anchor for a long time, has now been on the air for 13 years. Though NBC’s own singing competition, The Voice, has only been on-air for three and a half years, the show has already packed in seven seasons. That much reality has started to take its toll. This season’s finale of The Voice saw a 10% dip in ratings, while the finale of American Idol came in 22nd in the ratings. Part of the problem might be that American Idol and The Voice have maintained a format where episodes of the show are aired on multiple nights so they dominate their respective networks primetime programming and serve as the enviable lead-in for new, scripted, series. With this kind of programming schedule, plus multiple seasons airing each calendar year, it’s easy to understand how audiences could – finally – becoming fatigued. This past season of Idol premiered to only 6.76 million viewers; at its peak in 2003, the show’s final performances garnered 38 million viewers.
Redundancy would seem to be another major factor for waning interest in reality TV. When Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County, itself seemingly a mix between Desperate Housewives and the just-concluded scripted teen hit The OC, first debuted in 2006, it was shocking in its, well, realness. Viewers gasped with glee at the star’s McMansions and marriages, proud of clearly understanding more about these unknowable lives than the players themselves. The series’ success led to installments in other cities. There are now or have been Real Housewives franchises in New York City, New Jersey, Atlanta, Beverly Hills, Miami, and Washington DC, as well as spawning a current tally of nine spin-off series and international franchises in Greece, Israel, Canada, France, Australia, the UK, and South Africa.
But cracks have started to appear in the seemingly bulletproof housewives formula. The Real Housewives of New York City, the second installment of the franchise following Orange County, attracted only 1.3 million viewers, just more than half of the previous season and a fraction of earlier seasons. Perhaps these numbers reflect how with each new iteration of the same old show, the biggest problem seems to be not that audiences grow overly familiar with the format, but rather thee reality stars themselves are too aware of the constructs of their own on-screen personas – and their desire to parlay their television appearances into other business ventures. Let us not forget that for every Bethenny Frankel-helmed Skinnygirl cocktail line, there is also a Gretchen Rossi-founded knock-off purse-cum-cosmetics brand. The storylines seem increasingly aggressive and painfully scripted, consisting of: the “girls’ trips,” the drunken brawls, the hair-pulling, the marital strife.
And it seems silly to watch a badly acted reality show that is pretending to not be acted at all when there is so much remarkable scripted programming on air. This year brought us HBO’s True Detective, the resurrection of Showtime’s Homeland, a phenomenal second season of The Americans on FX, Fargo, BBC America’s Orphan Black, and the decadent feminist camp-fest that was the latest installment of FX’s American Horror Story.
Even network TV has stepped up its scripted game: The Good Wife (CBS) is perhaps the most intelligent show on television, unafraid to blow up the case-of-the-week format it started with to reinvent itself into a nuanced feminist drama. Shonda Rhimes dominates Thursday nights, serving as the showrunner and creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, and executive producer of this year’s new breakout hit, How To Get Away With Murder, whose pilot episode garnered six million viewers in DVR playbacks alone. Even long-running procedurals like Law & Order: SVU are being reinvigorated with ripped-from-the-headlines plots that turn a sharply critical eye towards current gender norms and stereotypes.
Ready-to-binge series on Netflix and Amazon such as Orange is the New Black and Transparent offer viewers not only a chance to marathon an entire season in one sitting, but a chance to connect with characters long-absent or misrepresented on both network and cable television, from women and minorities to gay and transgender individuals. Writers are writing excellent scripts; serious actors are lustfully tackling the chance to dig in deep with one character over a prolonged period of time. With so much good acting and writing currently available – and so much of it at the mere click of a mouse – reality TV, with its rehashed plots and archetypes, seems increasingly unnecessary.
The 19th season of ABC’s The Bachelor (which fails to even account for the additional 10 seasons of The Bachelorette the franchise has yielded) begins next week, with Iowa farmer Chris Soules in the eponymous role of just another ‘real’ man seeking love and marriage on television. While the long-running reality show has continued to bring in the ratings for the network, one wonders how many more years of roses viewers have in them to endure and accept.
Updated / Wednesday, 15 Jan 2020 07:18
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Analysis: reality TV might suggest fact not fiction, but these shows are highly produced, edited and curated to tell a story
Once upon a time it was Big Brother that us hooked nationwide, watching the every move of a group of real people who, in reality, had no idea how they were coming across to the world but were nonetheless trying to win the public's heart. In 2019 reality TV show Love Island has taken its place and is currently one of the most-watched programmes in Ireland, with hundreds of thousands of loyal fans tuning in to watch the contestants "crack on," "couple up" or get "mugged off" and face elimination. It is what it is.
It no doubt helps that one of this series’ biggest stars is Longford woman Maura Higgins , who by all accounts is single-handedly keepings things interesting. In the UK, over six million people tune in and the show is particularly popular with the lucrative 16-34 demographic. With the end of the 2019 series in sight, ITV has announced that it will air two series of the show in 2020, with the winter edition arriving early next year and set in South Africa. To use a phrase out of the Love Island playbook, it seems ITV are putting all of their eggs in one basket.
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From RTÉ TEN, Love Island 2018 contestant Eyal Booker hails Maura Higgins for empowering women.
But the reality TV format isn’t without faults. Love Island has, rightfully so, received numerous complaints and criticisms over its handling of contestants’ mental health after two former islanders took their own lives . Last year, a group of economists found that eight weeks on Love Island was likely to lead to more money over the course of your life than a degree from Oxbridge, held up by many as the perfect example of what’s wrong with reality TV and the world.
Those who don’t "get it" stand by and hit mute as talk of the dramatic events on-screen dominate lunchtime chats and social media for several weeks, but the appeal of reality TV is undeniable. As Brendan Rooney , Assistant Professor with UCD School of Psychology and Director of the UCD Media and Entertainment Lab , explains, the reason we're drawn to reality TV is simple: we love stories.
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From RTÉ Radio 1 Drivetime, psychologist Honey Langcaster James on the psychological impact of taking part in a reality television show
"The name reality TV might suggest that it isn't fiction, but these shows are highly produced, edited and curated to tell a story," Rooney says. "Stories serve as a kind of emotional treadmill – they allow us to practice empathy and "try out" social strategies without having to experience some of the horrible events from TV or fiction," he says. These stories have the power to make us think and form opinions and learn emotional skills, which we do "both consciously and unconsciously" when we watch, he says. Most people know that reality TV isn’t entirely real, but "when wrapped up in emotion, they simply don’t think about it."
Similarly, when we see a picture on Instagram, Rooney says we don’t necessarily think about the multiple attempts to get the perfect snap. But, "at the same time, people are experts when it comes to processing social information – we’ve been doing it all our lives. People are very perceptually sensitive to natural interactions, organic responses, unpractised facial expressions and so on - portraying this in a scripted film is what makes acting very hard. Reality TV offers a combination of unscripted dialogue and the illusion of non-editing – so we see it as more real."
People who don't like reality TV cannot draw any major meaning from it
Rooney points out that some who criticise reality TV say it's either not realistic or that they feel detached from the type of values displayed by the characters on it. In other words, he says, "people who don't like it cannot draw any major meaning from it; there isn’t a lot for those people to learn from watching it. Perhaps they don’t want to think about such social interactions or perhaps they do it too much in their own lives and that isn’t what they need from television."
This opportunity to process and respond to social interactions that are - or seem - more organic, can be useful or valuable to some people as a tool for learning. So why isn’t for everyone? Well, it might come down to the extent to which you engage with entertainment for characters, narratives, identity and meaning, Rooney believes. "Much narrative entertainment is about characters and social interactions – but some shows lean into this more, while others build the interactions around events and societal challenges.
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From RTÉ TEN 2fm's Doireann Garrihy presents Maura Higgins' Guide to Life - 3 simple rules for singletons
"People who love exploring relationships and friendships might like shows that emphasis the "unscripted" social interactions and small scale personal dramas, such as soap operas or reality TV; whereas others might prefer highly scripted and carefully designed narratives with event-based complexities instead of relationship-based complexities – these people might prefer things like Borgen or House of Cards ," he says.
"One important factor researchers have discussed is a viewer's "need for cognition" that is the extent to which they want to be challenged to process a complex story. Importantly, it is not to say that the relationships and shows such as Love Island are not complex, rather people are more highly skilled at processing social relationships and so they might find this easier to think about – they may watch these shows to switch off the thinking."
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From RTÉ Radio 1, Drivetime's John Cooke reports from Longford on the reaction to Maura Higgins on Love Island
Reality TV shows are "absolutely not all bad," he says. "On one hand, there is a large body or work that shows that processing these stories with social interactions has been linked to development of social skills, empathy and a sensitivity to emotion. They can encourage openness and discussions about relationships and help viewers bond in their own social spaces. On the other hand, they can sometimes give a warped perspective of what is important and how to go about achieving it.
"When consumption of these narratives outweigh everyday experiences they can begin to shift our expectations of what is "real". We need to make sure we have other outlets for our emotion, and other ways to process the world so as to remember that these shows are "products" highly designed to capitalise on our understanding of non-mediated natural interactions. If these shows start to make up the majority of what we know about interactions and relationships, then future shows need to be more extreme, more emotional, more outrageous, in order to achieve the same responses."
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Ray D'Arcy Show, 15 years of Big Brother with Anna Nolan.
As long as we keep in check the way the shows are binged, discussed and celebrated, Rooney says, reality TV doesn’t have to be a problem. If you’re a parent of one of the thousands of young viewers gobbling up all aspects of shows like Love Island, including the problematic ones, and you’re contemplating banning them from watching, there might actually be something to learn, Rooney believes.
"A useful tip is to watch the shows with young people, discuss them, question the motives of the TV makers, and where possible encourage kindness towards the so-called villains in the show - whoever is today’s "Nasty Nick" ( Nick Bateman from the first season of Big Brother UK ). Chances are that there are multiple perspectives and discussions around that can be a really good learning opportunity."
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
© RTÉ 2022. RTÉ.ie is the website of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland's National Public Service Media. RTÉ is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Images Courtesy of Getty Images.
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Trace William Cowen is a writer who also tweets with dramatic irregularity here .
2016 has been a landmark year for Netflix , who added a few more instaclassics to its roster of critically acclaimed original series while inspiring headlines about the decline of cable. According to Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos, the streaming giant is looking to outdo itself in 2017 by launching 20 (yes, 20 ) unscripted series and doubling its slate of scripted productions.
"Unscripted television is a very interesting business," Sarandos said at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference Monday, the Wrap reported . "The content itself seems to be largely interchangeable. Meaning, if you want to see a show about hoarding, there are three different shows about hoarding." True . But where does 20 hours of reality TV fit into Netflix's larger plans for the future?
For Sarandos, the important thing moving forward is to avoid getting trapped in any particular "model" by constantly taking logical steps toward reinvention. "What we try to do is take very measured swings for the fences, if that's possible," Sarandos said Monday, according to Variety . As part of their big unscripted push, Netflix is betting on global success for upcoming series like Sylvester Stallone's Ultimate Beastmaster. " When Beastmaster hits in Korea, they'll never have seen anything like it," Sarandos added.
This promise of a swath of fresh original content for 2017 comes just one week after Netflix announced the launch of downloads , just in time for the woes of migraine-inducing holiday travel. "While many members enjoy watching Netflix at home, we've often heard they also want to continue their Stranger Things binge while on airplanes and other places where internet is expensive or limited," Eddy Wu, director of production innovation at Netflix, said in a press release last week. With all this new shit that’s purportedly coming out next year, we all might need to start making room on our respective devices for some offline binging.
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