Reality TV

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My wife just suggested that PTA could handle "reality TV" quite well.

I agree with her, because my take on so-called reality TV is that it's a fictional story very much like any other, merely scripted or dialogued in part along the way. In other words, it has a hell of a lot in common with semi-improvised comedy sketches such as SNL or Laugh-In ... and leavened in its own way with the common human fascination with gossip and clique-forming. It's what many of the grubbier post-Three's Company sitcoms were striving for without knowing it.

The notion that each character embodies an Issue, and that conflicts bring these Issues to the fore, seems to me to be entirely as present and functional in this sort of TV as it is in plain ol' primetime or cable fictional TV.

I wonder whether fan mail, in this sense, might be considered the votes that come in ...? No mechanical difference but a stronger sense of competition among the group, perhaps.

Best,
Ron

[Matt Wilson]

I was actually thinking about reality tv myself. For shows like Survivor, plot scenes would be the events that the contestants all have to do, and the backstage drama is all character scenes. The way fan mail is awarded might match up with the votes on those shows. I have to confess I've never watched Survivor, but it sounds like people stay on the show by the mercy of their co-contestants. So maybe you can only award so many points of fan mail per episode. Who do you award them to?

I dunno about something like The Real World, though, or The Surreal Life. There's not really plot per se. It's all driven by the characters.

[Valamir]

I dunno about something like The Real World, though, or The Surreal Life. There's not really plot per se. It's all driven by the characters.

Oh no, there's tons of plot in the Real World.  

Some of it is front loaded.

"What happens if we put 2 militant blacks in a house with an ignorant red neck and a skin head racist"

or

"What happens when we take the single most annoying and vile human being ever born and put them in a house with a bunch of normal people"

or

"What happens when we put homosexuals in a house with fundamental christians"

or

"What happens when we put a sexually repressed hottie in a house full of oversexxed partiers...with a hot tub".


All that stuff is carefully planned in advance by the show creators in their choice of house mates.  They know full well in advance what the central conflict of the show is going to be.


The second way plot manifests and what is absolutely critical if you were going to do an actual Reality Show supplement type of thing is in the editing.  Conflicts can be manufactured by how scenes are edited together.  A series of isolated squabbles can be turned into a major knock down drag out by stringing them all together back to back.  

If you've ever seen those movie reviews where the reviewer panned the movie but the quote attributed to him sounds positive because its full of "...", that's exactly how the editing of these shows go.  There was one point where two house mates were having a huge arguement, and the arguement was complete fiction.  The two parties were actually argueing with different people, but the other people were edited out and by cutting back and forth between the two roomates they made it look like the roomates were argueing with each other when in reality the arguements didn't even happen on the same day.

They'll also reverse the order of scenes and other editing room tricks that more or less enhance, exaggerate, or out right manufacture plot on the show.  There may not have been a scripted plot at the time the scenes were filled, but there is absolutely a scripted plot at the time the scenes are edited together in final production.

[Mike Holmes]

I agree with her, because my take on so-called reality TV is that it's a fictional story very much like any other, merely scripted or dialogued in part along the way. In other words, it has a hell of a lot in common with semi-improvised comedy sketches such as SNL or Laugh-In

Or RPGs. To get self-referential for a moment.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Matt, I think you should develop that idea about the limited, semi-adversarial fanmail to represent the voting. I also think this version or application of PTA would benefit from potentially dangerous situations, so that failing rolls could really hurt or incapacitate the character (person, really), hence removing them from the episode.

So you can "lose" by failing rolls, sometimes, and you can "lose" by being voted off (not getting fanmail). With the whole underlying Prisoner's Dilemma of, if I help this person, am I gonna get helped back, which is fundamental to Survivor and related shows.

H'm. I'm interested now, and I don't particularly like these shows. Is PTA a way to discover an embarassing interest in stuff that one publicly and ostentatiously eschews?

Best,
Ron