CI5472 Teaching Film, Television, and Media
Module 7: Film/Television Genres ~ Different Genre Types
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Game shows began in the 1950s with shows such as The $64,000 Question and The Big Payoff which ultimately went off the air due to scandals associated with providing contestants with answers — the subject of the movie, Quiz Show. Between that time and the 1990’s, some shows, such as Wheel of Fortune, What’s My Lines, Jeopardy!, Hollywood Squares, To Tell the Truth, or The Price is Right, as well as shows such as The Newlywed Game, Family Feud, and The Dating Game, continued to be aired, but with Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, initially aired in Britain, and then by ABC in the 1999/2000 (six and one-half hours a week in 2000), the genre became the most watched of all television shows. These shows cost little to produce and, with shows such as Wheel of Fortune, can uses prizes as one more mode of advertising products. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One of the appeals of the show is the idea, associated with advertising employed to promote casino gambling, state lotteries, or horse racing, is that “anyone can win” — that someone can walk in off the street and win large sums of money. This appeal reflects the larger cultural myth that anyone, with a little luck, can “strike it rich” as a primary goal in life. This serves to further promote the larger consumerist, capitalist discourse constituting commercial television in which “winning” in life entails acquiring consumer goods. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One of the key features, similar to that of the talk show, is the unpredictable “liveness” of the shows — their sense of spontaneity, surprise, and improvisation, which, as Michael Skovmand (2000), makes it difficult to analyze the genre features of particular shows as shaped by a single organizing perspective: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Skovmand argues that shows such as Wheel of Fortune are highly inclusive in that they are not based on exclusive competencies or expertise, but rather on luck or chance associated with card games or bingo. The underlying theme, consistent with the “anyone can win” cultural myth, is that “everyone wins.” The drama of the program, accentuated by audience participation, revolves around the element of risk and luck associated with selecting the “right answer.” This focus on “getting the right answers” also reflects myths about knowledge and schooling as primarily that of acquiring information. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The success of the highly popular Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? paralleled the emergence of the similarly competitive “reality television” shows in the late 1990s such as Big Brother and Survivor. These shows built on the earlier “trauma TV” quasi-documentary shows, Rescue 911, Real Life Heroes, and America’s Most Wanted which employ camcorder/”actual footage” portrayal of “real” events, first person narratives, reconstruction of “actual” events, and commentators’ voice-overs (Dovey, 2001). To this was added a game-like context in which participants were portrayed in a documentary format competing with each other and voting on who remains in the game. While these shows lost some of their popularity after 9/11, they remain popular for certain audiences who become engaged with the participants’ lives. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One reason for the popularity of these shows is that, in contrast to drama shows, they are relatively inexpensive to create. They also involve a high level of conflict between participants, which producers highlight in their editing of content to create some degree of drama. Students could examine the ways in which these shows are shaped through editing techniques and the degree to which the shows portray the complexities of relationships and response to challenging situations. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Another subgenre of reality television involves placing people in difficult contexts — in 1900, in a London house based on life in 1900 and in Frontier House, in the 1883 in the American frontier of Montana and showing them coping with the difficulties of life without contemporary amenities. Underlying these shows is a basic assumption they are portraying “reality” in terms of the events portrayed — people breaking down under the stress, when, in fact, the “reality” portrayed is often highly edited, staged events to show more dramatic moments of what, in “reality,” may be relatively uneventful lives. These shows also assume that “reality” entails a highly competitive set of relationships between people — a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest world in which there are always winners and losers. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For further reading: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Andrejevic, M. (2003). Reality TV: The work of being watched. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Balkin, K. (Ed.). (2004). Reality TV. New York: Greenhaven. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Brenton, S., & Cohen, R. (2003). Shooting people: Adventures in reality TV. London: Verso. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Friedman, J. (Ed.). (2002). Reality squared:
Televisual discourse on the real. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Murray, S., & Ouellette, L. (2004). Reality TV: Remaking television culture. New York: New York University Press. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Smith, M., & Wood, A. (2003). Survivor lessons: Essays on communication and reality television. New York: McFarland. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Game Shows/ |
|
Teaching activities on genre developed by students in CI5472, Spring, 2004 |
|
