Sunday, November 23, 2008
The Impossibility of 'Reality' TV
Inspired by the previous post on 'Bear' I thought I'd share this with everyone.
The first ever reality TV show, to the best of my knowledge, was called "An American Family" which Wikipedia describes as:
" an American television documentary shot in 1971 and first aired in the United States on PBS in early 1973. The show was twelve episodes long, edited down from about 300 hours of footage, and chronicled the experiences of a nuclear family, the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, during a period of time when parents Bill and Pat Loud separated and Pat filed for divorce. In 2002, An American Family was listed at #32 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time list."
Baudrillard had some interesting ideas about this show in his essay Simulations (Trans. Paul Foss et. al. 1983 Semiotext[e])
"The End of the Panopticon
It is ... to this ideology of the lived experience, of exhumation, of the real in its fundamental banality, in it radical authenticity, that the American TV-verite experiment on the Loud family in 1971 refers: 7 months of uninterrupted shooting. 300 hours of direct non-stop broadcasting, without script or scenario, the odyssey of a family, its joys, ups and downs - in breif, a "raw" historical document, and "the best thing ever on television, comparable, at the level of our daily existence, to the film of the lunar landing." Things are complicated by the fact that this family came apart during the shooting: a crisis flared up, the louds went their separate ways, etc. Whence that insoluable controversy: was TV responsible? What would have happened if TV hadn't been there.
More interesting is the phantasm of filming the Louds as if TV wasn't there. The producer's trump card was to say: "they lived as if we weren't there". An absurd, paradoxical formula- niether true nor false: but utopian. The "as if we weren't there" is equivalent to "as if you were there". It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated 20 million viewers, much more than the perverse pleasure of prying." (49-50)
This brings to mind 'The observer Effect' which I believe was first used in physics in relation to Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, but has implications in psychology and information technology as well, both entirely relevant to communication media. It states that the act of observation changes the nature of the observed, effectively meaning that one can only ever observe what was there when one looked, not what is there after looking, the observed having been changed by being observed.
Perhaps this is the nature of the paradoxical involvement Baudrillard describes above. The truth about this 'TV-verite' is that we consume it because we are involved in it and would rather view actively than passively.
Of course modern reality TV is much different than An American Family. The circumstances of modern shows are much more contrived, the production values much more in line with flashy modern tastes etc, but the mechanism is the same as it was with the Loud family. After 60 years of passive viewing the public is demanding to participate in the media to a greater extent. This can also be seen in the internet. Perhaps the ever-more ridiculous and sensational premises of reality TV shows are a response to the economic gravity of the internet, a last ditch effort to save TV from a population that is tired of having no power over its programming.
A documentary, An American Family Revisited is available to be viewed on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DZauMwxOrw
Labels: Baudrillard, Loud family, reality TV
# posted by Ryan @ 11:13 AM 
