WE ACCEPT THE REALITY OF THE WORLD WITH WHICH WE ARE PRESENTED: While none of us may be living like Truman Burbank, mistaking a giant stage set for our everyday world, we do inhabit a culture in which "reality" and "entertainment" are no longer mutually exclusive categories. In studies like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Neal Gabler's Life: The Movie (1998), cultural critics and historians argue that turn-of-the-millennium America has become what Postman calls the "Age of Show Business," an era in which, as Gabler puts it, "entertainment has conquered reality."
Both Postman and Gabler see TV news programs as the earliest and best (or worst) examples of reality turning into entertainment. In the 1970s, local news stations battling for ratings developed the audience-grabbing formats of "happy talk" and "action news." Network news introduced magazine shows like 20/20 (1978) and Dateline (1992), packaging "serious" stories with music, graphics, and dramatic narration. During the 1980s, TV also began treating entertainment as news, as Entertainment Tonight and Hard Copy drove the engine of tabloid television and took celebrity gossip to a whole new level. Finally, with the emergence of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, viewers could enjoy wall-to-wall coverage of real-life crises -- what Frank Rich dubbed "mediathons" -- complete with theme songs, logos, and an entertaining cast of characters.
Parallel to this entertainmentizing of reality came the realitizing of entertainment, especially via reality TV. Beginning in the 1970s, hosts of daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey found enormous success by focusing less on celebrities and experts and more on ordinary people, both as guests and in the studio audience (a trend that would take a turn to the absurd in the '90s with Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael). Another strand of reality programming featured what David Letterman would call "Silly Human Tricks": Real People (1979), That's Incredible! (1980), and especially America's Funniest Home Videos (1990), truly one of the most influential TV shows of the past generation for its message that every moment of viewers' lives was potential "entertainment." From there, it wasn't that big a step to The Real World (1992) and Survivor (2000), in which "real people" become "cast members," taking on "roles" and acting out "plots" for viewers' enjoyment.
Obviously, this blog's readers lurve their well-crafted reality TV shows, and plenty of critics, both professional and amateur, agree. But is there a cultural cost to our obsession with reality-based entertainment (and entertainment-based reality)? How has the reality boom changed our definition of popular culture -- indeed, our definitions of both "reality" and "entertainment"?
Next week: video games, multiple-arc TV shows, the Internet, and other topics addressed in Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You. Feel free to follow along at home.
Both Postman and Gabler see TV news programs as the earliest and best (or worst) examples of reality turning into entertainment. In the 1970s, local news stations battling for ratings developed the audience-grabbing formats of "happy talk" and "action news." Network news introduced magazine shows like 20/20 (1978) and Dateline (1992), packaging "serious" stories with music, graphics, and dramatic narration. During the 1980s, TV also began treating entertainment as news, as Entertainment Tonight and Hard Copy drove the engine of tabloid television and took celebrity gossip to a whole new level. Finally, with the emergence of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, viewers could enjoy wall-to-wall coverage of real-life crises -- what Frank Rich dubbed "mediathons" -- complete with theme songs, logos, and an entertaining cast of characters.
Parallel to this entertainmentizing of reality came the realitizing of entertainment, especially via reality TV. Beginning in the 1970s, hosts of daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey found enormous success by focusing less on celebrities and experts and more on ordinary people, both as guests and in the studio audience (a trend that would take a turn to the absurd in the '90s with Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael). Another strand of reality programming featured what David Letterman would call "Silly Human Tricks": Real People (1979), That's Incredible! (1980), and especially America's Funniest Home Videos (1990), truly one of the most influential TV shows of the past generation for its message that every moment of viewers' lives was potential "entertainment." From there, it wasn't that big a step to The Real World (1992) and Survivor (2000), in which "real people" become "cast members," taking on "roles" and acting out "plots" for viewers' enjoyment.
Obviously, this blog's readers lurve their well-crafted reality TV shows, and plenty of critics, both professional and amateur, agree. But is there a cultural cost to our obsession with reality-based entertainment (and entertainment-based reality)? How has the reality boom changed our definition of popular culture -- indeed, our definitions of both "reality" and "entertainment"?
Next week: video games, multiple-arc TV shows, the Internet, and other topics addressed in Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You. Feel free to follow along at home.
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