Why <i>Who Wants To Be a Millionaire</i> Is a Hit
The most important thing that's changed about the major TV networks in the
last few years, aside from their steadily shrinking share of the audience, is
that more and more of their programming is "reality-based." On the one hand,
you have the continued proliferation of the too-scary-to-be-fictional genre,
which was pioneered by Fox and exemplified by When Animals Attack and
World's Scariest Car Chases . At the same time, more and more of the
networks' schedules are occupied by news shows--which generally have at least a
loose connection to reality--such as Dateline . And although America's
Funniest Home Videos is no longer provoking belly laughs across the
country, variants thereof air regularly as specials.
The great virtue of reality-based programming is that it's relatively
inexpensive to produce, since very little of the material needs to be paid for.
And for people who are supposedly obsessed with celebrities, Americans seem
remarkably interested in what other "real" people are doing--as long as what
they're doing involves either being chased down with 40 vials of crack,
fighting a long illness, driving the wrong way on a freeway, or getting upended
off a ladder by an overly friendly springer spaniel. (Wasn't that a great
segment?)
Perhaps as a result of its success, though, "reality-based programming" is
now being used as a label to cover shows that are, well, not real, like the
huge hit game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and its recent
successful competitor Greed . Millionaire has picked up where it
left off this summer, dominating its time slot and actually casting a slight
halo effect on its ABC peers, while Greed has been one of the only--OK,
the only--bright spot in a disappointing fall season. It's their success
that prompted a recent headline in Variety proclaiming "Nets Reap
Ratings From Reality Shows."
What's odd about this is that game shows--even if they're not fixed like
they were in the '50s--are real only in a very tenuous sense. Thoroughly staged
and stage-managed, they're dramatic, or perhaps melodramatic, precisely because
of the artificial structure of their formats. We don't, it's true, know how any
given episode of Millionaire is going to turn out, and even though one
might say the same about a forthcoming episode of ER , the fact that in
theory no one knows how the Millionaire episode is going to turn
out may make it more real.
But Millionaire and Greed are to Cops and When
Animals Attack as the zoo is to the Serengeti Plain, offering a kind of
semblance of uncertainty (and, therefore, reality) instead of the actual thing,
whatever that might be. In part, the actual thing is just the possibility that
something genuinely unexpected is going to happen--who knew that deer could
beat down hunters with their front hooves?--but in part, especially with a show
like Cops , it's the possibility that nothing especially important is
going to happen. Millionaire , by contrast, is circumscribed in both
directions. You know it'll be exciting but not too surprising, and you know it
won't be too surprising but also not dull.
Game shows do have many of the same advantages as true reality-based
programming--relatively low production cost, endless supply of material--and
some others in addition, including the ability to keep Chuck Woolery off the
dole. And the fact that TV viewers would rather spend prime time watching a
not-so-great-looking guy answer questions about the Great Lakes than watching
gorgeous twentysomethings pretend to be teen-agers has to count for something.
But only in a world as totally hermetic as that of TV production would game
shows count as real . Next we'll probably hear that Felicity
counts as real, too, since the people saying their lines on the show are actual
human beings who are actually saying the words.
Sounds good to me.
