This was written for the university subject, BCM289.
Television across culture has become a near-universal pass time for many people around the world. Oftentimes, people will be sitting at home on a Friday night, relaxing, taking a load off...and they decide to put on some Bachelor or something.
Look, I don't know a lot about reality television. My experience is limited to the first half or so of my life, watching shows like The Biggest Loser or early MasterChef seasons with my family. However, after a while, I fell off the reality TV gravy train and never bothered to get back on, not that I had any desire to. For me, the vast majority of reality shows just didn't interest me, they all manipulate what's going on with editing, they can be extremely formulaic, yada yada yada.
But I think that's what people like about reality shows, the formula that is. It's less about the expectation of what's going to happen, it's how it's going to happen. Take MasterChef for example. Everyone knows that contestants are going to be presented with ludicrous cooking challenges (which continually up the ante to keep the audience watching) and week by week, these contestants are going to be eliminated and picked off one-by-one.
This is the point: competition is the name of the game - you start off with a couple of people and, at the end, there's only one king of the show's respective mountain. And there's something almost primal and instinctive about these shows because of that. There's the excitement and enjoyment of voyeurism that people derive from reality TV because it feels like we're peeking into another world that looks like our own, sounds like our own, but there's still something uncanny about it, something that's not quite right - and that's due to the fact that the way things are structured on reality television in the editing suite creates a storyline separate to the once "true reality" that the contestants actually experienced.
It feels like a deliberate, planned season of a fictional show: the tension between different characters, the uneasy alliances, the inevitable crumbling of those alliances...it all feels part-and-parcel of something planned out, controlled and scripted (and it might very well be).
In short, that struggle between individuals to determine who is the best at [BLANK] is a universal theme that transcends borders and culture. It's why shows are made and remade in different countries, yet the original format is practically unchanged, that while "shows [are] locally produced and rely on local talent, [they're] all based on formats that originated elsewhere, "imported ideas" that were recycled..." (eds Oren & Shahaf 2012, p. 23) for another culture.
That, in a nutshell, is a main reason why television formats, particularly those that may have once been based in some kind of reality, are largely successful in translation. Because they rely on universal themes and understandings that are broad, unspecific and mostly easily digestible on a lazy Sunday evening when you just need something to watch.
But again, not like I know a lot about that anyway.
References:
Oren, T & Shahaf, S (eds) 2012, Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders, Routledge, New York, NY.
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