Some people would like to drive a stake through the heart of the reality-TV genre. I feel the same way myself, sometimes, but it passes.
The reality-TV phenomenon continues unabated and it is extremely useful as a barometer of the culture -- it's a way to measure levels of acceptable behaviour and a source for determining the obsessions of societies under stress.
It's very useful to look at what reality-TV shows are successful in Canada, the United States and Britain. In Britain, by the way, they're celebrity-obsessed. The show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here recently aired to astonishingly high ratings and received blanket media coverage. It featured a bunch of no-talent tabloid celebs, plus the guy once known as Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols, cavorting and bickering in a remote Australian location.
The man once known as Johnny Rotten used the occasion to hurl abuse at the viewers at home, use the c-word and then storm off. Everybody in Britain was glued to it. Johnny Rotten's actions appear to have turned the show into a gloriously grotesque send-up of cheesy reality TV, idiotic celebrity worship and the standards for language and behaviour on TV. The show worked its magic by catering to viewers genuinely awed by the second-rate celebs and simultaneously to those viewers who relished Johnny Rotten trashing the entire production.
Things are different here and in the U.S. The thing is, the reality-TV genre has now split into several subgenres. On the one hand, we have the old reliable, the mating-dance shows such as Average Joe, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. (There's a new Canadian dating-and-mating show starting tonight. More on that in a minute.) Then there are the freak shows.
The freak-show subgenre is thriving at the moment. Fox launched My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé in January and millions of Americans have been thrilled by the high jinks -- a nice young woman, a schoolteacher no less, is obliged to pretend that a gross hoser is her fiancé, while her family reels in horror. Already, the nice schoolteacher lady has been fired from her job.
This week, Fox takes the freak show up another notch. The network has launched the two-part The Littlest Groom, which features Glen, a single chap who is 4 feet 5 inches tall, and searching for a mate. He is introduced to women of his own size and then the gimmick is that he's introduced to women of average height. Will Glen spurn the women who are little people, like himself, and choose a taller woman? Will millions of viewers be agog?
So far, the organization Little People of America has declined to endorse or condemn The Littlest Groom, waiting to see just how exploitive it might be.
But some people are horrified and making their feelings known. To date, no Canadian channel has picked up the rights to broadcast The Littlest Groom. That suggests that the freak shows are not to our taste. We like something more ordinary in the reality genre.
Most American reality-TV shows are about winning and losing. The current sensation, The Apprentice, is all about winning and losing in the workplace. Survivor, which still draws millions of viewers in the U.S. and Canada, has always been a reflection of workplace tactics for winning and losing. American Idol (tonight, Fox, CTV, 8 p.m.) is about winning or losing in the entertainment racket. Sure, the show proclaims that everybody is a winner, but in the end, it's about one winner and the also-rans.
Hooked Up (Toronto 1 and Craig channels across Canada, 10 p.m.) is the new Canadian reality series. It's from the company that brought us Popstars and it's one doozy of a dating-and-mating show. As it declares right off the top, it's about 10 hunky guys and 10 gorgeous girls. They're brought together in the pleasant setting of Banff, Alta. They have to pair off, it seems.
The show is staggeringly blunt and to some people it will be unbelievably crude. The chosen singles are good-looking, if your standards of beauty extend only to bosomy blond women and the chiselled-male-model type of man. Apart from being pretty, they are narcissistic, predatory and, frankly, none too bright. None is exactly articulate, unless they're talking about themselves. In the introductory segment, one of the young women says, "Right now, I'm focusing on me." They all are, actually.
There follows a game of spin-the-bottle in which the singles can ask for a kiss or a confession from their opposite number. The result is some behaviour that upsets a few of them. One guy tries on an open-mouth, tongue-rich kiss on a woman he's just met. One woman is asked to name the least attractive person in the group and she manages to insult another woman.
Soon enough, they're all being catty or boasting. There is a strange, compelling quality to Hooked Up. For many viewers, the contestants are the sort of shallow types they'd encounter only through television. There is bad behaviour, selfishness and backbiting. Eventually, one assumes, there's hot sex between these preening airheads.
It's our acceptable, Canadian version of the freak-show side of the reality-TV genre.
Also airing tonight: Nova (PBS, 8 p.m.) is a detailed investigation of the crash of Swissair flight 111 into the sea off Nova Scotia in September, 1998. The program chronicles the piecing together of the debris and then shows us computer-generated reconstructions of the flight. The conclusions are scary.
Dates and times may vary across the country. Please check listings or visit http://www.globeandmail.com/tv
