REALITY TV BYTESREALITY TV BYTES Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever! For the union makes us strong!
For those with the ‘long, protracted strike’ pick in their office pool, news that talks between the Writers Guild of America and producers had resumed this week couldn’t have come at a more awkward time. If a settlement is just around the corner, does a month or so constitute a short or a long strike? It is significantly less than the last WGA walkout in 1988 which lasted five months but it has dragged on long enough to force a shutdown of television production, and a significant loss of revenue for both sides. Shall we just call it a wash and start laying bets on the duration of the actor’s strike, scheduled to start sometime in `08? In terms of human interest, watching a group of white-collar workers who normally sit around their computers and come up with stories for a living, walk a picket line doesn’t really generate much heat. It’s not like dirty-faced coal miners demanding a living wage and safe working conditions. This one gets tucked away with professional athletes going on strike. I mean, look at them, pampered cry babies, stopping us from watching our favourite shows because some arcane spat over.. residuals? Just another case of millionaires squabbling with billionaires. When it comes down to sitting back and enjoying our favourite past times, we tend to ultimately side with the billionaires. It just so happens that I’m currently reading What Happens Next: The History of American Screenwriting by Marc Norman. Suffice to say, acrimony and suspicion have hovered over the relationship between writers and producers from square one, or in this case, the FADE IN. Much like today, writers who were actually working in the early days of Hollywood fared very well compared to other working stiffs, especially your run-of-the-mill, Depression-era dust bowl farmer and the like. There was always the question, though, of how equally they were sharing in the riches flowing during the first Golden Age of movies. One incident in particular emphasizes this point. Jesse Lasky Jr. tells the story of being paid an advance of $250 to write a script. He did. The producer didn’t like it, demanded changes, new characters, new setting. Before he saw the rest of his money, Lasky did three more, full rewrites. After completing and being paid for what he thinks is a script for one movie, Lasky discovers later that, in fact, the producer made four films. One from the initial script and three from his subsequent rewrites. Like their high paid athlete counterparts, there is a dubious history of unscrupulous double-dealing that film and television writers are well aware of when it comes to cutting up slices of the financial pie with their bosses and overlords. What one might call, if one were in the biz, getting screwed in the back end. Blah, blah, blah. Boo hoo. Deal with it. Sort it out. We want our MTV, which you probably still have since it, like most specialty and lifestyle channels, has little need of writers to function. Along with.. and I’m grtting my teeth as I write this.. “reality” TV. Word has it that because of the work stoppage more “reality” TV will flood the airwaves. Apparently, the invasion of primetime by this ghastly genre began shortly after the last writer’s strike in 1988. This stopped me up for a moment, certain we’d only been under assault from this plague for a few years. Then, I remembered. America’s Funniest Home Videos, the granddaddy of televised “reality”. It debuted in November, 1989, over-exposing us even more to the smirking, smug mug of Bob Saget. The very same Bob Saget I found myself next to in the Gentlemen’s of a theatre after seeing Schindler’s List. Letting us both settle into the business at hand, I eventually turned to him and said: Now that was one of your funnier home videos. You don’t know derision until you’ve had Bob Saget standing at the urinal next to you, dripping.. contempt. Needless to say, I’d blown any chances of securing a staff gig on Full House. America’s Funniest Home Videos. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Survivor. Big Brother. American Idol. I cannot keep the bile down. Sure, there’s an inherent bias there. As someone with more than one un-produced sitcom pilot in his closet, unscripted programming, as they call it, poses a threat to my livelihood, however indirect. The more of it, the less of me or mine. No question. But it goes beyond that. It’s a taste thing, a preference. “Reality” TV offends my sensibilities. As I’ve said before, I’m no Masterpiece Theatre/PBS/Discovery Channel snob. I have committed more Saved by the Bell to memory than any person my age should possibly admit. Yes, I remember when Elizabeth Berkley had normal sized boobs, OK? It’s just that this “reality” TV isn’t. It’s fake. Like Elizabeth Berkley’s new boobs. It in no way, shape or form resembles reality. What’s worse, the “reality” they try to claim sucks. No, wait. What’s actually worse is that the whole “reality” show premise is what we used to call, back in the day, afternoon television. Rehashed, tarted-up game shows crossed with soap operas. The filler we got to watch when we felt too sick to go to school that, eventually bored us so much we actually decided to take the opportunity to study for the test we had forgotten all about and that had made us too sick to go to school in the first place. American Idol is simply The Gong Show minus the tongue-in-cheek humour, Paula Abdul this generation’s Jaye P. Mor-g-o-o-o-o-n!! Dude, I hear you saying, chill out. It’s only bad television not some Middle East peace plan you’re on about. Yeah well, if you haven’t noticed by now I take my bad television very seriously. For me, it’s all about Zach, AC Slater, Lisa, Jessie, Kelly and that dimly lit Screech, and how they’re yet again trying to pull the wool over Mr. Belding’s eyes, at 4:30 in the afternoon when I’m not speaking with my computer or late, late at night after having just cracked open another Strongbow which I absolutely did not need. Do not try to pass this off as primetime entertainment, like they did with Zach and Kelly’s wedding in Las Vegas which I totally did not watch. And stop trying to pass off “reality” TV as anything even in the ballpark of that description. TV? Yes. Reality? Hardly. It is as carefully manufactured behind the scenes as any scripted drama or comedy. “Creative producers” are, in fact, writers, only not as well paid. That extra cash funnels back to corporate HQ, where the decision makers are further insulated from having to deal head-on with the reality (note the lack of quotation marks) of declining audience numbers. Cynically, they keep telling themselves that they’re simply giving the people what they want. To paraphrase Christopher’s accomplice, Brendan Filone in season 1 of The Sopranos (a scripted series, don’t you know): They shit on our heads and expect us to thank them for the hat.
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