Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Reality show ideas


/ shows / reality / real /
The ever captivating riverbend reports on being deluged by US propaganda and TV:

...I’ve been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so… clean. It’s like hospital food. It’s all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women’s rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once...
...We sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy. I’ve always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality- I just didn’t know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere...


She then suggests a blockbuster of an idea for a really interesting reality show:

...Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…


She says she'd tape every episode of a show like that. Hell, I'd pay for it.

Somehow I suspect that there will be trouble finding any volunteers...

1 comment:

DoDo said...

Not as radical, but still something: to my amazement, German trash channel RTL2 started a reality show in which rich yuppies have to survive in a city they haven't lived in for thirty days, without anything - including money and home.

The advertisements show the first guy became a homeless, but I have too strong a feeling that too much of the show could be fake (or cleverly edited) to bother to watch it.

BTW, why don't you switch to pop-up comments?