So I see we have a new reality show coming to Fox called “the Jury”. And from what I can tell, it seems like a national audience voting on the fate of a criminal.
What the hell is going on here.
I hope I’m really really wrong about The Jury concept
How far away do you think our society is from a reality show just like Stephen King’s The Running Man? Really funny and unbelievable twenty years ago…and now I’d say we’re about two years out from seeing it happen.
Thankfully, you are wrong. It’s actually a drama from the guys that did “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Oz.” Knowing the Fox advertising machine, I’m not surprised, though, that you expected it to be a reality show.
I’d like to think that we’re not going to see anything that bad. I realize that I’m being really optimistic, but I can’t believe that we, as a people, could ever sink to that depth.
Oh, here’s a link on The Jury.
Wow. The folks at Fox have got some super misleading commercials going on. Random people on the street holding up signs of how they vote on certain crimes. It looks like reality.
I hope I’m wrong about the running man as well…but when we get tired of seeing people pick out their spouses, what’s next?
It may seem like were getting close to this point but the big dividing line is still that everyone involved in the reality shows are there on their own free will.
Running Man takes it a step further and puts inmates on tv fighting for their lives gladiator style.
But that step further is a huge step since human rights and consent intervene.
Even on shows like Judge Judy and the People’s Court the people agreed to be there. I believe in turn for appearing on the show the loser in each case doesn’t pay a dime, the tv show pays all of it.
Barring some kind of Renaissance in American culture (ha!), 5-10 years.
I remember when I first saw the movie, it seemed a little ridiculous. Now it just seems ahead of its time.
By 2020, we’ll be seeing executions on the broadcast networks.
Well, according to the BOOK, not the MOVIE, everyone on the running man is there of their own free will. They CHOOSE to forgo their trial and sentence in an effort to escape bounty hunters and other pitfalls on their way to freedom.
The movie is a very twisted version, far from the book.
I think we’ll have gladiatorial combat on TV by 2010. Seriously. Fights to the death.
Would a show where two people fought with swords, spears, trident, etc. fly on TV today if a) everyone were consenting and b) it wasn’t necessarily to the death, but death was a possible outcome?
If you want a movie with a similar plot but with out the 80s lycra-fest, you should try and hunt down a copy of Series 7. It’s eerily close to almost all othrer reality shows - but with added gratuitous spree killings :eek:
I hated Series 7. Started off as a good movie but turned pretty bad and near unwatchable by the end.
The best movie on this sort of thing is a French film called Man Bites Dog. It’s like Spinal Tap but the subject is a serial killer. It’s amazing how the ‘media’ or the film crew gets co-opted by the killer.
Just wait till they figure out to have voting going on during a police chase. However ever the viewing public votes is what the cops do. Press 1 to contine the chase. To use deadly force, press 2.
IIRC in the book the participants were not even criminals at all, they were volunteers playing for big cash prizes.
The idea isn’t original with Stephen King – Robert Sheckley wrote a story in the 1950s entitled The Prize of Peril about a reality-show series on TV where they place the contestants in dangerous, life or death situations (like waking up in the cockpit of an airborne single plane – and you have no pilot training) and film the results. If you win (survive), you get a cash prize. That predate’s Running Man by 20-30 years.
Harlan Ellison wrote a column in F&SF about Sheckley calling him up after the whole Richard Bachman/King business revealed King’s pseudonym and brought The Running Man to public attention. He was very troubled about the similarities, because he couldn’t believe that King would knowingly lift ideas from him. Sheckley and Ellison both concluded that King must have read Sheckley’s story and forgotten about it, his subconscious dredging up the plotline without recalling its provenance.
We already have that without weapons. It’s called boxing. We having that with cars. It’s called auto racing. I say this as a fringe fan of boxing and an avid racing fan. It’s just true that death is a possible outcome.
We have already had the TV show American Gladiators. There is UFC and K1 (both fighting with mixed forms of defense and offense). However, I see a line being drawn with the use of weapons. If it was produced in the United States, I could see a big problem with the waver of liability.
Probably not well, but there wouldn’t be the level of opposition that you would encounter with … oh, a few seconds of footage of a topless woman outside of a National Geographic special about some part of Africa, or or use of the f-word on prime time briadcast television. I would bet that groups with names like “National Family Heritage Association” and “National Association for Family Heritage” and “Heritage Association of Families in the Nation” would stay quiet.
[George Carlin]
I’d have naked upside-down crucifixions on TV once a week at halftime of the Monday Night Football game!
[/GC]
They were very low class, mostly unemployed ‘low lifes’. Ben Richards starred on the show to raise money for his family I believe.
The kicker being there was absolutely no way you could win…SUPPOSEDLY.
The point is there are people who will sacrifice even their own life and safety for the possibility of money and/or fame…and when a network like FOX finds those people…why WOULDN’T they bank on it?
People already are being starved and injured on shows like Survivor and the viewing audience finds it FASCINATING.
I’m going to have to go read it again – IIRC, in the book, The Running Man, the hero’s kid was sick and he was trying to raise money for medicine. I think, if you won, you got to go home and keep the money.
Anyway, point being, I think we’re just about there already, but for different reasons. In King’s book, the whole system was set up in a way that you really couldn’t avoid television and the propaganda was all skewed toward the end of mind control by the government…
Uhh, wait a minute. Maybe that’s not so different. Perhaps the networks saving a fortune by not having to hire writers (which offends me greviously as a writer) is just a bonus and this whole thing was set up by the illiterati… oops I mean illuminati (perhaps the same thing?)…:dubious:
I may have to kill my television. Right after I found out which of my friends wins our Survivor pool. 
Oh, of course there’d be some complaining, but they wouldn’t be showing titties or saying naughty words, so it’d be alright. We’d have 3 or 4 threads in The Pit going, with some people saying “Oh, the horror!”, the usual “Are you saying TV networks shouldn’t hate money? Why do YOU hate America!?” crowd chiming in, and people like me coming in to snark. There’d be a huge uproar, of course, the kind of “controversy” that ensures that millions of people tune in. The ratings would be huge and everyone would be so horrified that people would watch this CRAP that even more people would tune in to be “horrified.” Then the usual bitching would begin and everyone would express outrage at how DARE the TV networks show this GARBAGE, while still recording every night and talking about it all the time. And then the anti-movement would spring up, with people spouting off about how they never watch it and have never even seen it (kinda like some of the bitching around the Friends finale), while still watching it.
Then they’ll start selling endorsements. Nike! When you need to get away from the Evil Gladiator Dudes! And then the evil Gladiator Dudes will be covered with patches, like NASCAR drivers.
It’ll be huge, so long as no one shows a breast or says “Fuck.”
Second that. What a cool movie. And I thought the deaths of the sound guys were very Spinal Tap.
You know, I utterly detest sports, watch the Superbowl only for commercials, and long for the days when the sports seasons didn’t overlap one another (because, then you didn’t have to worry about your favorite show being bumped because of some damned game), but I have to admit that I’d watch this religiously.