A Thinking Man

I’ve watched too many reality TV programmes. I can recognise the architecture behind many of them only too clearly. Most now follow a pattern. Their predictability is boring me and the genre appears to be exhausted. They are crafted so tightly that the notion of ‘reality’ is absurd.

The key to all good fiction is conflict. In any story, the reason why the reader becomes involved is that he or she wants to discover how the conflict that the author has set up is going to be resolved. We become sucked into the saga and want to see the denument. In reality TV, the programme makers know that the desired tension and conflict that needs to be resolved may arise, but they can no longer afford the luxury of waiting for it to happen. So it has to be engineered and compressed into 30 or 60 minutes to tell the story. The ingredients have to be forced, the plot has to be shaped, the reality is thrown out of the window.

It seems that there have to be three major elements - the good guy(s), the bad guy(s), and the stakes.

The good guy is the person (or persons) wanting to initiate change or share expertise with the people who need it - the Gordon Ramsay, Alan Sugar, Gillian Monteith, Trinny-Susannah figure. In the early series of Big Brother, at least one good guy would emerge.

The bad guy is the person (or persons) resisting that change. Either the change is too big for them, or more usually in recent programmes, they are psychologically resistant to that change. This is where the supposedly absorbing conflict develops - the tension (even hatred) between the two main protagonists. The reason why Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is arguably more dramatic viewing that You Are What You Eat is that in the former, the restaurant owners never ever want the advice (despite asking the expert in) whereas in the latter, the bad guys are usually compliant to some degree.

The stakes are very important in the plot for at least two reasons. First, the higher they are, the greater the tension. If someone’s health, or self-esteem, or career, or financial security is at stake, we want to see how the problems introduced by the bad guys are resolved. Secondly, the stakes often invoke a degree of sympathy for the characters in us. If someone is risking a huge loss we often start to feel concern, despite the awkwardness of the bad guys.

The evolution of the genre can best be seen by contrasting an early series like Castaway (a series showing several families surviving on an island and building a community over a long period of time) with The Real Swiss Family Robinson (one family surviving on an island for a month and compressed into one programme). In the former the conflict grew naturally as the characters overcame the elements of the island and faced their differences together. In the latter the conflict is guaranteed as the families have clearly been chosen because they will find the experience difficult and because their is internal conflict in the family unit. Similarly the early series of Big Brother allowed the conflict to develop naturally between the fairly ‘normal characters’. In the latter series, at least one (and in some cases many) of the characters have an identifiable personality disorder likely to cause disruption in the house, and the conflict is further increased by the acts of betrayal involved in many of the tasks they are set.

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is a classic example of the new ‘reality’ genre, however, this reality is little more than a carefully constructed fairy tale.
1. Good guy arrives at bad guy’s place. He eats the food and always finds it disgusting - to prove that the bad guy really does need help.
2. He is then rude to the bad guy to set up the conflict.
3. He tries to change the bad guy, and not surprisingly (given the previous rudeness) the bad guy resists. The conflict hots up.
4. The conflict continues and reaches a boiling point. We are left wondering if this ever can be resolved. How on earth will the good guy win this one?
5. At this point we are reminded of the stakes. An interview with the bad guy’s family (often involving tears) reminds us that the stakes are enormous. The good guy has to win. We must see how he does it.
6. The good guy works his miracle. He has a variety of tricks up his sleeve. He changes the menu. He teaches someone to cook. Someone often gets fired or walks out. The restaurant gets a new name and a makeover. He has a heart-to-heart alone with the bad guy.
7. The bad guy changes. It all ends happily ever after.

The genre is worn out. If we are going to have ‘reality fairy stories’, let’s have some new plots and some new elements. It might be refreshing to have a programme where the conflict is less engineered, and where something really does go wrong and remain unresolved for a change. Let’s have less carefully selected good and bad guys. Real life in reality might just be the novelty needed to revive the expiring patient.

Tags: Fairy Tales, Gillian Monteith, Gordon Ramsay, reality tv, Sir Alan Sugar, Trinny and Susannah