The Future of RealiTV
By Ben (2000/08/29)It's a sad fact of human nature that people want to watch the suffering of others. This is highly evident when watching the news, or any one of the current slate of RealiTV programs. Both of these things get millions of people tuning in to each episode in a fevered frenzy thirsting for pain. No one cares about the stupid games that the Survivor people play in order to earn food. They watch to see one person per episode get booted off the island--just so that they can laugh as his or her dreams for a new life are squashed on national television.
Right now, the loser only has to go home, but if RealiTV is going to have a future--not that I think that it should--someone will eventually have to die. I say this, because people will only watch so much of the same mindless stupidity over and over--soon they begin to crave new and different stupidity. It has to continually get more real and more intense. Well, nothing's more firmly entrenched in reality than death. So, pay attention would-be television executives--if you'd like to be promoted to vice president, be the first to air a realiTV show where people expire.
The first shows entering into this realm of programming will undoubtedly be very little more than what I've outlined above. They'll simply be a bunch of people dropped on an island, and the last one alive will win a new car or a lifetime supply of Cap'n Crunch. But, another sub-fact of the sad fact of human nature that I've mentioned above, is that people want those people they're watching suffer to be as similar to themselves as possible. People at home want to be able to relate to the people on the screen--to be able to say, "if I was there, I'd have done this better. The problem with "Ultimate Survivor"--as I'm sure it will be named--is that the contestants would all have to be Navy Seals to have a chance. If they tried to mix it up, as they've done with Survivor, it would be a slaughter. It would still get good ratings, but they couldn't stretch it out for 16 episodes.
I believe that the show that will succeed in the long run will be one from a completely different school of thought. Right now, the shows are based on the goal of attaining wealth and with that wealth, a new life. This show wouldn't have life as its goal--instead, the sweet release of death would be the ultimate prize. The contestants' box would be filled with terminally ill patients in excruciating pain. They would take turns answering increasingly difficult trivia questions to win a fabulous, nationally televised execution. The surviving contestants would be forced to live out the rest of their tortured lives enprisoned in pain--the greatest pain being the knowledge that that they were mere inches away from getting out, yet they live on because they couldn't remember who won the Oscar for best picture in 1953.
Now, that's some television you could curl up in front of with some buttered popcorn.