What’s it to me? As others have said, every hour that reality tv occupies is an hour that could have been filled with something that I might want to watch. There are no guarantees, of course: never have been, never will be. But as I refuse to watch any reality tv, its downfall is totally upside for me.
Sure, some, probably many, hours next season will be filled with imitations and ripoffs. But not all of them. Every new show that comes on has a chance to be something new, and different, and original. More than that. A show that works on its own also allows other good shows that otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance at life to have their chance. I watch both Law & Order and CSI. The latter wouldn’t have had a chance without the former. (And, no, I don’t watch any of their spinoff series.) I have to believe that any new trend that appears will be more to my liking than reality shows. So it’s hugely important to me that they die.
You can have a few hours of reality tv that I won’t pay attention to, twickster, but in return I want back those twenty or thirty hours of real programs so I can start watching television again.
No kidding. How many pilots with the potential of The Simpsons or Family Guy got swept off the desk when Fox decided to spend its budget on long-stemmed roses for some dippy fuck to give clueless pillocks on the newest must-see reality series, Pestilential Crack-Whore Hydrocephalic Bachelorette III?
Maybe FOX should have thought of that before cancelling good shows, like Firefly and Wonderfalls, or even Tru Calling without giving them any chance to succed.
Fucking FOX. Maybe they’ll give Point Pleasant a decent chance now.
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No kidding. How many pilots with the potential of The Simpsons or Family Guy got swept off the desk …?
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Probably not all that many. FOX has always gone for the cheaply produced, lowest-common-denominator show. How many seasons was Married…With Children on?
As for Reality TV… eh. They’ve always been glorified game shows, except you have the same contestants for the whole season. And like any game show, you need a good premise, a good starting point, in order to have anything interesting. And, like game shows, there are many attempts at having wacky, extreme, off-the-wall premises as an eye-catcher.
The clue-meter is still reading zero at Fox headquarters. The problem is not that they’re showing too many reality shows; the problem is that they’re showing too many bad shows. Next year’s cut-rate imitations of Desperate Housewives and Lost won’t be any better than this year’s cut-rate imitations of Survivor and Real World.
Speaking of Family Guy . . . eh, it’s a good way to kill 30 minutes, but the humor is too much of a Simpsons ripoff and Chris is the most annoying and unfunny character to ever grace the small screen. What they need to bring back is Futurama.
I’m not holding my breath, unfortunately, and I really want this show to have a chance. Although it’s premiering tonight, I believe its time slot is Thursday at 8pm CST, which puts it up against CSI. FOX has given it The OC as a lead-in, which will probably get a few people in the door, but I guess time will tell if they stick around.
Seth McFarlane is also doing a new show for FOX called American Dad, which will premiere after The Family Guy on Superbowl Sunday.
I started at thread called “Whither the great cheesy F and SF shows of yesteryear?” and there are a lot of people who LIKED those cheesy shows and still watch them in reruns. It’s highly unlikely anyone’s gonna watch reruns of reality shows. I mean, I like Fear Factor and they’re rerunning it on some cable channel or other, but I’m just not interested. I guess I never liked it that much.
So what’s likely to happen is the networks who went most heavily for reality TV are going to have a huge, gaping income hole down the road becuase they won’t have shows to resell to cable stations for reruns. If they’d been programming cheesy F and SF shows, they’d have a lto more income from that source.
The thing that irks me about all this “Reality” TV is that is isn’t reality. People do not act real when they have cameras trained on them. Some of them purposely play that up so they can boost their soon to be acting career. Heck all you have to do is get on one of these shows to pretty much guarantee you’ll hit a few talk shows or get to be a guest reporter on Extra or Entertainment Tonight. No real talent needed. Then the media decides we must really want to see these people and they are constantly shoved down our throats. The shows are also edited and manipulated by the producers to get their desired result, so the end product is even further from reality.
I’d rather give the product of real writers, actors and producers that has an actual plot a chance than the same warmed over “reality” premise.
What I don’t get is why three separate genres having in common only relative unscriptedness, low production costs, and all getting popular at once, got lumped in together.
– Makeover shows
– Competetion shows
– Documentary shows (perhaps only the Osbornes qualifies?)
However, another thing they have in common is I’ve never turned them on. I’ve never gotten up and said “hey, a reality TV show is on! I wanna watch Survivor: South Central LA!” I’ve seen enough of them when others have had the TV on to know the only good part of them is the dance theme to QE4tSG (if it recurs, dunno since I’ve only seen it once or twice.)
Then again, I’ve only liked 3 or 4 non-public television shows ever anyway, so unless a show is another Simpsons, MASH, Gargoyles, or 1st-season Dark Angel, I’m not gonna watch it.
And definitely not if it’s on Fox: I caught one episode of Firefly, but since it was a good show, I knew it was going to get cancelled, so never started watching it.
Or, they’ll sell their reality reruns to an upstart channel called “Reality Central.” I am not making this channel up. (And I am also trying to get DirecTV to carry it.) Famewhores will ALWAYS watch themselves on television.
There are several documentary shows – American Casino, for example, which is being cloned on another network in a show about Caesar’s Palace.
There’s a 4th category – the hookup show (Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire). The interesting thing about this category is that it has produced exactly one long-term relationship, in a dozen tries.
In each category there are the fairly good and the truly awful. As happened with game shows, when WWTBAM took off – the market gets flooded with the truly awful, and everything gets washed away.
Actually, I think Fear Factor is exactly the kind of reality show that’ll do well in reruns. Shows like Survivor depend on you following, more or less, the entire season - Fear Factor just requires a one-hour committment. And not even that, really, you can watch it for 10 minutes to see the guy eat bugs and then shut it off. Given that, I can see it attracting more viewers than, say a Buffy rerun.
And cable stations get a lot of mileage out of their reality reruns - TLC shows Trading Spaces and While You Were Out all the time and ditto MTV with Real World, Battle of the Sexes, Pimp My Ride, etc.
There’s also a 5th category…the drama show (Real World, High School Reunion). AKA Let’s give a bunch of reasonably attractive (but woefully stupid) twentysomethings free alcohol and a place to stay and see who hooks up/fights with whom.
I desperately want them to make this channel. It’d be great if the reality shows were walled up behind a fence, marroned on big channel that’d never cancel a show I like in order to make another show about idiots trying to get the guy/girl/money/recording contract/money. It would be great.
I liked Pasadena, Haunted, Miracles, Wonderfalls, John Doe, and other shows killed off so the networks could parade more “unscripted” stupidity across the dial. :dubious:
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