MickeyThe Real Deal
I've always found the sky to be beautiful- day or night, in any weather, it's always been a breathtaking sight. With a tendency to watch the skies, I happened to notice one day a series of cloud banks, all at off angles to each other... and it struck me that if I ever saw a sky like that on the screen I'd figure the special effects people were distracted that day. As real as that piece of actual sky was, it would never have been accepted as real on TV.
When I was a tyke, I would often be left in the care of my grandmother. Busy herself, she would leave the TV on, tuned to what she must have taken for "educational" TV: Game shows. While I certainly learned how quickly you can suck the pride and self-respect out of anyone merely by pointing a camera at them, aside from Jeopardy I found most of them to be a powerful soporific- much too powerful to be administered to children.
Fast-forward a few decades. The TV networks (like any business) wants to make money. Competition from cable, first-run syndication, direct-to-video and the various illegal hallucinogens available is making it ever more difficult to make more money by making cheaper programs. I suspect that something somewhat stronger than alcohol was involved in the creation of their answer: Survivor.
The concept issimplistic simple enough: A bunch of non-SAG people compete for a prize. Not paying them unless they win, not paying for scripts and extensive sets, special effects, wardrobe, guest stars and so forth made this one of the cheapest hours of TV to produce.
Unfortunately it was also a runaway hit, and with Hollywood execs smelling money like sharks smelling blood, Hollywood quicklyripped off borrowed the idea of a non-scripted contest for the myriad of copycats currently on the schedule.
Of course, the whole idea of a "game show" conjures up the standard image of hyper-caffeinated contestants freaking out over the least little prize, so the producers knew the show would sink before it even premiered if it was lumped in with the other game shows.
The answer wasdishonesty simplicity itself: Call their game show something else... and so the oxymoronic "reality show" was born. So far none of them bears any slight resemblance to anyone everyday "reality." In fact, Survivor: Geographical Location has always scrupulously avoided having anyone from that area actually compete on the show.
This is not a dig at anyone who enjoys these shows; it's a big world and there's room for everyone's show on the schedule, one man's meat is another man's infomercial, it takes all kinds to make a demographic... I'm poking a stick at the shows themselves, and the people who "created" them, not the fans. I just wanted to make sure this blog doesn't deteriorate into the kind of situation where people stop being polite... and start being "real"...
When I was a tyke, I would often be left in the care of my grandmother. Busy herself, she would leave the TV on, tuned to what she must have taken for "educational" TV: Game shows. While I certainly learned how quickly you can suck the pride and self-respect out of anyone merely by pointing a camera at them, aside from Jeopardy I found most of them to be a powerful soporific- much too powerful to be administered to children.
Fast-forward a few decades. The TV networks (like any business) wants to make money. Competition from cable, first-run syndication, direct-to-video and the various illegal hallucinogens available is making it ever more difficult to make more money by making cheaper programs. I suspect that something somewhat stronger than alcohol was involved in the creation of their answer: Survivor.
The concept is
Unfortunately it was also a runaway hit, and with Hollywood execs smelling money like sharks smelling blood, Hollywood quickly
Of course, the whole idea of a "game show" conjures up the standard image of hyper-caffeinated contestants freaking out over the least little prize, so the producers knew the show would sink before it even premiered if it was lumped in with the other game shows.
The answer was
This is not a dig at anyone who enjoys these shows; it's a big world and there's room for everyone's show on the schedule, one man's meat is another man's infomercial, it takes all kinds to make a demographic... I'm poking a stick at the shows themselves, and the people who "created" them, not the fans. I just wanted to make sure this blog doesn't deteriorate into the kind of situation where people stop being polite... and start being "real"...
