| Stephen Lewis: Modern reality TV shows seem suspiciously familiar |
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By: STEPHEN LEWIS, Post Columnist
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Posted: Sunday, June 14, 2009 6:59 am
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Television certainly has come a long way, hasn't it? I remember as a child we had four channels and an antenna sticking out the top of our roof. At my grandmother’s you actually went outside to turn the antenna if you wanted to change from CBS to NBC to ABC. For those of you under 30, I'm not making this up. No, I was not raised in a cave with a huge stone for a door. Nor was I afraid to go outside because a saber-tooth tiger might gobble me up. Although there was a German shepherd in the neighborhood that occasionally got loose that kept us on our toes when we rode our bikes by his yard.
But sometime in the late 70s or early 80s a new invention called cable (pronounced kay-bull) TV was introduced to our area. Oh, the things they had on cable TV. You could watch Australian rules football on ESPN. You could watch wrestling out of Atlanta on TBS and see wrestlers who didn't look like the guy who worked at the local K-Mart like the ones out of Nashville. And sometimes, if you were lucky, the signal that blocked HBO wasn't fully working, and you could see snippets of racy movies the likes of which you only dreamed about before.
Since that time the evolution of TV has gone through times dominated by sitcoms. Other times dominated by dramas including cop shows and doctor shows. And even brief periods when game shows made a comeback on prime time. But nothing quite compares to what we have today, which is the age of the reality show. And I don't mean that in a good way.
As a matter of fact I think we've quite possibly hit the lowest point in TV history. Nowadays a TV executive doesn't have to write a good script, develop interesting characters, or look for talented actors. Just come up with a dumb premise and throw a bunch of nobodies in, and you've got a TV show. In fact, many of the reality shows developed recently are just rip-offs of programs shown many years ago. I don't remember the names of the shows but I do remember the gist and maybe some of you can help me remember the titles.
One of the first of this generations reality shows is CBS's “Survivor.” Several people are dropped off on a deserted island and left to fend for themselves and each week one person is voted off. This sounds suspiciously like a show I remember as a child. I remember there were seven people on a boat. The first mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper was brave and sure. Five passengers set sail that day for a three-hour tour ... a three-hour tour. The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed. That's about all I remember. I know one of the passengers was a millionaire. And his wife. A movie star. And the rest. But that's all I remember. I just remember it was people on an island just like this “Survivor” show.
And what about this “Jon and Kate plus 8” show that is getting so much attention lately. A married couple raising eight kids would be pretty difficult but I don't know if it's TV show worthy. Particularly since I'm pretty sure it's been done before. I could be dreaming but I remember a show very similar. It was a story, about a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls. They all had hair of gold, like their mother. The youngest one was in curls. It was also the story of a man named...I can't think of the name but he was bringing up three boys of his own. There was four men, named altogether, but they were all alone. Anyway, the man met the woman, they knew it was much more than a hunch, And that's the way they became the...dadgummit, for the life of me I can't remember that title. Something lunch, munch, punch. Dang it!
Well, you get the point. There just aren't many shows that haven't been done before. Maybe now is the time for me to spread my creative wings and develop my own show. Yes, I'm thinking of something right now. How does this sound? We get a group of people together and put them in a bar in a big city. Get a real good looking fellow to play the owner, a real dumb guy to be a bartender, one cute waitress to use as sexual tension between herself and the owner, and another waitress who's a smart aleck type. Maybe a couple characters to play customers. A chronic out-of-work type and a real know it all. We put them all together in a real cool looking bar. You know the kind of bar I'm talking about don’t you? The kind of bar where everybody knows your name ... I'm a genius! |
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