The conventional wisdom goes something like this: At first, there was standard TV, largely dominated by formulaic sitcoms and hour-long dramas. Then, Reality TV started taking over around the turn of the century, and from that point on, it’s been “bye-bye” traditional sitcom, hello people you’ve never heard of eating bugs.
Reality TV (or as its producers prefer to call it—Unscripted TV—though both labels are equally misleading), offers an opportunity to indulge our voyeuristic impulses, while adding a dimension of unpredictability—without scripts, who knows what will happen.
In a traditional TV sitcom, it is unlikely that, for no good reason, the two co-stars will just sleep with each other, unless this is an integral plot point that’s been developed over many weeks. But in Reality TV, one night boozing and suddenly there’s a three-way in the shower. One of the things that makes “real life” drama so satisfying is the knowledge that it’s unscripted, which means there is no limit to what salacious things can happen. And just knowing they are (sort-of) real, gives it all an extra kick of intrigue.
And Reality TV is a lot cheaper to produce. Making it, so very attractive to networks.
All of which seemed to imply the days of the two act sitcom were at an end. And good riddance right, because if you’ve seen one episode of Family Ties, you basically can predict how any future episode will end (with the possible exception of when Alex gets hooked on diet pills-even Jesse Spanos didn’t see that coming).
But now, a funny thing has happened. As producers have discovered some of the limits of reality (i.e. it’s boring), they’ve become more and more, shall we say, “hands on” in shaping/editing/(scripting) storylines for so-called reality TV shows, so that now, watching an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians (see previous blog post for explanation of why I would ever dream of doing this), I realized that it wasn’t reality TV that is displacing traditional sitcoms—it’s actually the other way around.
In other words, Reality TV is now more scripted, more formulaic, more predictable, than so-called “scripted” programming, employing the kind of conventional plot resolutions that make Leave it to Beaver look unpredictable and edgy.
Case in point, in the Kardashians episode I watched, Kris (the mother), gets her hand on some herbal male-enhancement pills from a friend. She decides to sneak them into her husband’s coffee to “spark” their love life. Having done this, she starts coming on to him and they engage in a lot of extremely long, love making sessions (all implied because we only see the closed door with the kids one by one knocking on it, asking when they’ll come out, until in a comic scene-ender, the dad slides his credit card under the door and tells them to go shopping).
Then, of course, comes the twist. One morning, Kris’s son accidentally gets the coffee meant for the dad with the herbal pill slipped into it. A few hours later, he has an erection that won’t go away (tee-hee). He has to be rushed to the doctor’s office. The doctor asks him if he’s taken and ED medication, which he has but he doesn’t realize it, so he says no. So they plan on sending him to the hospital for more tests, confused about why this could be happening.
This forces Kris to finally admit what she’s done in front of the whole family in the waiting room of the hospital. The husband and son are furious at the deception, but Kris explains that she only did it to rekindle their love life, and the husband explains that it wasn’t the pills that rekindled their love life, it was the fact that Kris was more amorous because she thought the pills would make him more interested in sex.
The misunderstanding is buried at a family dinner with some light humor and the episode wraps (there was a B story line too, equally formulaic, but that’s for another time).
I’m thinking if this storyline were proposed for a show like, Two and a Half Men, a show that is fairly formulaic (see my amazing spec of the show for an example of how formulaic works), it would have been dismissed as preposterous. But because it’s “reality” TV, they can get away with it. Kind of.
Which all leads to the conclusion that it’s only a matter of time before we get laugh tracks on reality TV shows and disclosures indicating that “Keeping Up with the Kardashians was filmed before a live, studio audience.”
And patient readers, I promise, no more Kardashians in this blog from here on out. Unless I get a job writing for the show…
