HOW TO DO TV STUDIES 3.0 161
HOW TO DO TV STUDIES 3.0 161
Between 2001 and 2008, reality shows proliferated to the point where they occupied 20 percent of prime- time US network pro- gramming. So the writers’ unions, which include over 3,000 people, sought to gain coverage of the genre, though program owners insisted that their work did not amount to creating scripts as per drama. This counter- claim was ludicrous. Reality television relies as much as ever on writers, but engages the labor process in reverse: a logger notes scenes of interest from raw footage, which are then resurrected as a show by five to ten writers working for a supervising story producer. Like all TV, reality programs are written; people create scripts with dialog and drama, even though they don’t invent characters as per action or comedy. For example, on Survivor (2000–), story editors interview contestants on- site then influence their subsequent conversations. Big Brother leaves the script to post- production (Higgins and Benson 2005; Ross 2009; Writers Guild 2008). A study of US cable networks at the height of QESG found that reality shows accounted for 39 percent of writing jobs – this for a putatively natural, unscripted genre, that is actually created again and again in highly competitive environ- ments that work against collective bargaining and the expression of collective interests on the production side, even as the texts them- selves fetishize individual transcendence. The result for employees? Eighteen- hour days, no healthcare, no meal breaks, no overtime, and poor wages. The genre features infinitely greater insecurity of every kind than other television. Writers on America’s Next Top Model (2003–) were fired when they sought to unionize, while two class- action lawsuits were settled in 2009 for US$4 million. Mean- while, editors and other workers filed a similar action that year against FremantleMedia North America, which owns American Idol (2002–), in protest at up to twenty- hour work days, seven days a
week, without meal breaks (Richardson and Figueroa 2005; “In Focus” 2006; Friedman 2009g).
The common view is that reality television proliferated simply because it met audience desires: Michael Grade, head of Britain’s ITV, claims that drama fails to match the genre’s “emotional drain” (quoted in Billington and Hare 2009); John Birt, the BBC’s former Director- General, says it has “liberated Britons to express them- selves imaginatively and individually” (2005). Nevertheless, although it is fixed upon by cultural critics who either mourn it as
162 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS representative of a decline in journalistic standards or celebrate it as
the sign of a newly feminized public sphere, reality should frankly
be understood as a cost- cutting measure and an instance of niche marketing. Stuart Hall notes the failure of attempts to use Celebrity Big Brother (2001–) for political purposes. They derive from the mistaken belief that “this was an authentic site of the popular and that one could go into it and pass a message to the outside in an untransformed way” (Taylor 2006).
The origins of reality television lie in the activities of the Propa- ganda Ministry of the Nazi Party in the 1930s. Die Kriminalpolizei Warnt! [The Criminal Investigation Department Warns!] was the Party’s centerpiece of TV programming. Fritz Schiegk spoke live with police officers about unsolved cases and invited audiences to cooperate in catching opponents of the state. When television returned to Germany after the war, the genre quickly became popular. For forty years, that show’s successor, Aktenzeichen XY . . . ungelöst [File Sign XY . . . Unsolved] (1967–), has been a model for police–civilian collaboration series around the world, such as Crimewatch (1984–) and America’s Most Wanted (1988–). The key contemporary source of the reality- TV phenomenon has been Italy, where public television pioneered the modern genre due to competition from new private concerns (Bourdon et al. 2008: 113–20).