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Response 12 (rough draft)

Page history last edited by marielle frattaroli 12 years, 4 months ago

     Here’s the world of reality television. The cast members bear little resemblance to your usual television actors (but they also seem quite unlike you and me). In exotic settings and high-stakes competitions, strangers are stranded and banded together, elevated to star status as long as they are willing to do and say things we could never imagine. Video editors whirl through raw footage, past the mundane, in search of incidental lusts or brawls. Promises are bound and broken in a single breath. Triumph is declared over enemies who, moments before, were friends who, days before, were strangers. True love may or may not be found, depending on whether the check is real. (Jaffe)

     

     This is almost an exact picture of what reality shows have come to be.  Over the past thirty or so years, reality television has become quite the oxymoron.  These shows are not reality.  Reality TV shows are a horrible source of entertainment because everything about them is indeed fake, not reality, and they provide bad morals to their audience. 

The fad of reality television started way back in the 1940’s and 50’s with Allen Hunt’s “Candid Camera” and the more ‘talent search’ type show, “Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour.”  Just a few years later, throughout the 60’s and 70’s, reality shows were turning regular everyday people into normal celebrities.  The first show to do this was a documentary style show called “An American Family” which followed a family going through a divorce.  Also during the 60’s and 70’s, dating shows started to appear where people would give anything, including their dignity just to be on TV.

     

     The 80’s and 90’s are when things really started to heat up for the reality television industry.  The show “Cops” was the first to introduce the camcorder look, which is now a huge phenomenon.  One of the most famous reality shows as well as well as one of the longest running also came to be: “The Real World.”  This show brought strangers from all around the country and put them in a house together.  Everything these strangers did, including the partying, fighting and hooking up were recorded.  It introduced the concept of unscripted drama which many reality shows now rely on.  The strangers were recorded 24/7 for five months which produced thousands of hours of video which had to be cut down to less than a hundred hours of video to fit into a season of one hour episodes.  Production studious like Avid Technology made that happen.  They were able to cut days and days of footage into a small amount of time.  This was later caught on by shows such as “Survivor” and is needed for nearly every reality show now-a-days.  In the summer of 2000, there was a huge blow up for reality TV.  The finale special of “Survivor” had over 53 million viewers (almost as many as the Superbowl has). Categories for reality TV shows were added to the Emmys.  There were even television channels that started devoting every time slot to reality shows.  MTV is now one of these channels.  (Doesn’t MTV stand for music television? Hmm…) Since the blow up in 2000, people have become addicted to these shows.  They have literally taken over.  You might as well switch the M to an R to stand for reality. 

     

     Over the course of reality television’s rise to popularity, the messages the shows give have changed drastically.  What used to be all about fun, and real life problems has turned into drinking, fighting, having sex, humiliation and people trying to be “beautiful.”  These reality shows don’t even try to replicate real life anymore.  These worlds that these “characters” live in are completely fabricated.  These people are thrown into unreal environments and are told to act a certain way.  The producers specifically select the participants of the show and carefully design certain scenarios, events, and settings to encourage particular behavior.  Mark Burnett, creator of “Survivor” has agreed to this and makes sure to avoid the word ‘reality’ when describing his shows.  “I tell good stories.  It is not reality TV.  It really is unscripted drama.” –Mark Burnett (Wikipedia).

 

            Almost everything on reality shows are planned, even though they are said to be unscripted.  The film editors search and search through hours of footage to find drama worthy enough to be on television and often combine audio and video from different times to get the result they want.  They even make the characters re-do a fight, kiss, etc. if the camera angles weren’t good the first time.  As you can see, these shows are far from reality, but that’s not what the audience thinks.  

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED...

i have to add more body paragraphs as well as a counter argument

 

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