“57 Channels And Nothing On”

It’s a lyric from an old Bruce Springsteen song and while it’s hopelessly out of date, the basic truth of the statement still remains. In this day and age, there are hundreds of channels and still, nothing on.

Well, nothing save the latest in a string of unimaginative rip-offs of Survivor and Who Wants to Marry A Millionaire. Reality TV has basically taken an industry condemned and rightly so for it’s lack of originality and driven it to a new low. Back in the 70s and 80s, critics were constantly bashing television as a haven that reduced its brand of entertainment to the lowest common denominator, going for the cheap laugh, condescending drama and low-brow humor.

As it turns out, the critics who believed that the Dukes of Hazzard and Gilligan’s Island signaled the end of civilization as we know it were getting off easy. Instead of using television as a means of escape, people must know watch inept riffs of reality after a hard day of work.

Folks, I’ve worked in the retail industry since 1991. I know all about how modern day society has fallen into the dregs of humanity when compared to the Norman Rockwell portrait we were all lead to believe that this “utopian society” would become by the turn of the 21st Century, I don’t need to watch a bunch of morally corrupt degenerates degrade themselves just to “outwit, outlast, outsmart” each other for a quick buck.

Apparently, even the so-called high art of film-making, championed by pretentious film students as art (using slow-moving, unintelligible flicks like “the English Patient” or “Sense and Sensibility as evidence) has fallen victim to this new movement. “The Real Cancun” basically had film-makers turn on their cameras and film a bunch of drunk, sex-starved college students on spring break and sent it into theatres.

Is the day of the writer dead? Is it easier, cheaper, yet still as profitable for entertainment executives to just tell directors to film a bunch of people doing embarrassing things, edit it together in that irritating MTV style and try and shove it off as entertainment?

Of course, what little of the familiar style of television is left on the dial isn’t doing those of us who prefer the “escape from reality” method any favours. Prior to the end of the series (coming soon), NBC was paying each cast member of Friends…what? a million dollars per episode of that show. From what little I know about sit-com television production, each episode takes approximately a week to be produced. In other words, Matthew Perry is being paid a million dollars a week to walk from his trailer, say about ten minutes worth of stuff that someone else wrote and then go home.

Maybe that bit of information sheds some light on why the industry is rapidly adapting this “reality TV” format. Get a bunch of nobodies, put them in a situation where they can make complete idiots of themselves, edit out all the boring stuff and bleep out all the swearing (sure to pop the ratings) and viola, you’ve got an instant hit.

No need to hire writers, save for someone to come up with the initial premise of the show. No need to pay extravagant salaries, just have them compete for a prize at the end of the show. Even if the final pay-off is, say a million dollars, it’s only the cost of one Friend for one episode. Anyone signing up to be on these shows are make enough just off the publicity of the show. I mean, doesn’t every Survivor cast-off get to be on Letterman or Good Morning America?

And how soon before one publishes a tell-all book for about 10 times what they’d make if they’d won?

Maybe, Survivor and Joe Millionaire and the like aren’t what is slowly eroding the long- maligned genre of television programming. Perhaps, it’s the likes of Friends and their sky-rocketing salaries.