COMMENT
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public," as the old saying goes. Incredibly, more than 50 years later, it's the code by which reality television producers in the United States and elsewhere live by.
No doubt newspaperman, political commentator and literary critic H.L. Mencken would have had a good laugh over present US television. According to an online biography, he frequently skewered "the insatiable American appetite for nonsense and gaudy sham".
Just as we thought it couldn't get any worse, the latest venally brilliant spin on the genre is the set up, or "reality-twist" as it's known. You've probably heard about them already — the shows where a willing victim doesn't know he or she is actually part of an elaborate practical joke.
Joe Millionaire (repeating on TV3) probably started the trend, but soon to start on Sky 1 is There's Something About Miriam, the show where the six British guys competed for the affections of a beautiful woman. Or was she? That's the twist — Miriam is a transsexual. The poor saps (one a Royal Marine) never figured it out. Some of them got physical with her.
So appalled by this Crying Game-style revelation, the six men sued and walked away with something to the tune of $300,000 each, which no doubt helped with their pain and humiliation and cleared the way for the show to air in Britain.
Ironically, it only took Australian Big Brother participant Ryan, a former footballer, a matter of hours to click to what six Brits never discovered, which kind of ruined the ratings that Channel 9 in Australia had hoped to get out of popping Miriam into the Big Brother house.
We're also about to be tortured by Average Joe, a show where a former Miss USA contestant and model thinks she's being whisked away to Hawaii to meet a bunch a Prince Charmings. Of course, they're just average guys, including a 154kg sewage contractor, and a 1.6m engineer.
This is not a million miles away from My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, which may play on TV3 this year, where a young woman was signed up for a reality show that she didn't know anything about, taken to meet a bunch of hunks in a mansion and told she has to fool her family and friends she has fallen in love and is going to get married in a couple of weeks.
The twist? There's a couple: first, the hunks disappear and the real fake fiance is a bulky, hairy, obnoxious guy called Steve; second, that Steve is actually an actor who is deliberately being as big a jerk as he can. This one puts her family through the ringer as well.
How about Joe Schmo, which is a parody reality-twist show (confused yet?), in which two people, a man and a woman, think they are on a show called Last Chance for Love, but everyone else is an actor. Big Shot is like The Apprentice, only the job and the tycoon are fake.
By contrast, the first generation reality shows are looking positively ethical. The Amazing Race and Survivor are just expensive gameshows; Big Brother once earned the tag postmodern from British film magazine Sight & Sound.
But Mencken's astutely cynical comment lives on, especially the "never went broke" part. Profits are up for Endemol UK, Fox Entertainment Group, Mark Burnett et al. People watch this stuff. As always, there is no accounting for taste.
<i>Fiona Rae:</i> Endless appetite for twisted reality
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