The suspense of who is the last person left on the island. The intrigue of who will be the next cast member banished from the house. These two mysteries have set ablaze the reality television craze. The popularity of CBS’s reality based show “Survivor” has sent the major networks scrambling to fill their programming slots with reality programming. Entertainment and media experts shared their opinions on why the reality television phenomenon has become some of the highest rated programming on television and why the American public can’t get enough of this genre. The reality television craze began in the late 80s with FOX’s “COPS” and the early 90s with MTV’s “The Real World.” CBS introduced “Survivor,” in primetime this past year and the show has been a ratings juggernaut since its debut, ousting ABC’s “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” from its perch atop the Nielson Ratings. “Survivor” is part athletic competition and part soap opera. The show began with two tribes, the Tagi and the Pagong, pitted against each other in weekly competitions and to ultimately survive 39 days on the island of Pulau Tiga in the South China Sea. The winner of this test of endurance takes home a $1 million prize. CBS quickly added a second show, “Big Brother” to its line up with similar elements, but more accommodating surroundings. “Big Brother” features 10 people from different walks of life living in a house under 24 hour surveillance. The goal on “Big Brother” is to outlast the competitors in the house and win the $500,000. “Big Brother” also features competition among cast members, but the American public is the final jury on who stays in the house and who is asked to leave. Real Attraction, or Who Wants to be a Voyeur?

Individuals are drawn to reality shows because viewers enjoy seeing other people’s everyday lives, according to Katherine Marsh, contributing editor for Rolling Stone. “Part of it is that people are really into the celebrity of the ordinary, just seeing people in their everyday lives,” she said. “And I think part of that has to do, this is my own theory, from a certain type of disconnection that people are feeling from their lives right now.” Stephen Coon, associate professor of journalism and mass communication, added that an intriguing aspect of reality television is the viewer is one step removed from fiction. “As you’re watching this on television, it seems as if it is fictional, and yet the events involve real people and you can more realistically imagine yourself in a similar situation and you can more realistically identify with these folks,” he said. The merging of fiction and sport with voyeurism on shows such as “Survivor,” give the programs a soap opera feel that captures the audience’s interests, Coon said. “There are going to be winners and there are going to be losers,” he said. “I think with `Survivor,’ what is appealing about it is the fact that you know that there is a final moment when someone is actually going to be the survivor. Someone is actually going to win the $1 million and we’ll find out who that is and I think people will start to really get involved and then maybe start taking sides and rooting for certain individuals.” Marsh attributed the long life span of shows such as “The Real World” to the fact that people want to be on the shows as much as they want to watch the program. However, she doesn’t think these shows are an accurate representation or real life. Marsh spent six months writing a story for Rolling Stone about “The Real World: New Orleans.” She witnessed the casting and interviews of individuals trying to earn a spot on the show and was at the New Orleans house for six hours the night the cast moved in. She said the night at the house was mostly “boring,” because they have to shoot so much video to fill one 30 minute episode. When viewers watch these shows they share in the lives of the cast members and witness their emotional crises and feel part of a connection to them, Marsh said. “I think on the flip side of that, I think people like to watch it also to make fun of the people on the shows as well. So I think there is also a sense of gaining some sort of identity or sense of self by putting down the people on these shows and saying, `I’m not like that. I would handle that situation differently. I’m smarter than those people’,” she said. Roots of Reality

Tom Beell, professor of journalism and mass communication, said maybe amateur video of natural disasters and the like may have prepared viewers for the contrived reality shows that are featured on television today. “This is reality, but it’s not reality,” he said. “Let’s face it, they set up the conditions, the producers of the programs manipulate the conditions and force these people to do things, but it’s fun to watch them do it. “I see them all similar in that they are supposed to be potraying real people in real situations and how they deal with them,” Beell said. He added that reality television’s origins can be traced back to the 1940s to a radio program that spawned “Candid Camera,” in which the host would approach individuals on the street to get their candid responses. “Maybe it’s just an extension of this long running program format,” Beell said. Reality Reproduces

Reality TV shows such as “Survivor,” are now experiencing a surge similar to the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” phenomenon because other networks are developing copycat programs that are similar to the original. “Almost immediately after `Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ came on, there were all these clones, these similar programs that the other networks created to put on the air, and then weren’t quite as effective or as popular as the ABC program,” Coon said. The duplicate shows are usually not as popular as the original program, Coon and Beell said. FOX and ABC are both looking to get involved in the reality television craze with similar shows in the works. FOX’s show, “Wanted,” will pit three teams of runners against a group of trackers, former bounty hunters and law enforcement officials, who are trying to capture them. The teams of runners will be required to perform tasks in public and viewers can even get in on the action and arrest the runners. ABC will air a similar show, “The Runner,” by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. One contestant is followed by a camera crew and must work his way through a specific area and complete physical challenges along the way. Viewers are given clues to the runner’s whereabouts and the longer the person can evade capture, the more money they win in the end. ABC will also air “The Mole.” Ten people, five men and five women, compete in a foreign land to accomplish a series of physical and mental challenges and collect prize money that could total $1 million in the end. One member of the cast is a mole however, with the objective of sabotaging the success of the group. Contestants take “The Mole Quiz” every few days and the contestant with the most wrong answers leaves the group. In the end three people, the mole and two contestants, battle for all the money the group won throughout the three week adventure. – Despite the high ratings and media coverage of “Survivor,” the downward spiral may already be beginning for other, similar shows. FOX canceled “American High,” which followed a group of high school students from Illinois, after only two weeks on the air. “Clearly, they’re not all going to work, and I think people will get tired of them in time,” Beell said. “How many times and how many situations can you put people in that an audience will want to watch them deal with this? You’re going to run out of ideas after awhile.” He added there might be less intrigue next spring for the sequel to “Survivor” and other shows that are popular now. Jennifer Spencer, general manager for ISU 9, said the financial success of shows such as “Survivor” is unquestioned, but as a journalism major, she finds it hard to become excited about something that isn’t creatively put together and is intrusive on the lives of the participants. “It’s interesting enough to watch, but I’d rather see a well done piece of fiction,” she said. Spencer is unaware of any reality based television programming planned for ISU 9, but that doesn’t mean that the station will not air a reality show. “Producers can come to us with whatever they want to do, so I guess if somebody wanted to do reality based television, as long as it fit with our programming standards, they could,” she said. Real Repercussions

Reality shows are rather inexpensive compared to dramas and that concerns Beell as an avid television viewer. “I think what we are losing are the conventional, fully produced programs, the dramatic shows in particular. I think we are losing those at least for awhile, because the networks are scrambling to put these other shows on,” Beell said. The actual reality content of these shows vary, he added. “There’s no question that putting a camera in a police car and photographing what the police are up to is more authentic than putting a group of people in a house and controlling access to that house,” Beell said. Some experts question whether reality shows exhibit any redeeming qualities. “The absence of redeeming quality doesn’t necessarily cast them as negative,” Coon said. “I think you can have programs that you might look at as a wash, as simply neutral.” Marsh said these shows provide people with a reflection of others’ struggles through life that they may relate to. – “The redeeming quality of these shows is the sense that our lives aren’t always that much different,” she said. “People really need that, they need to have that sense of what’s really going on in our lives. They need that sense of how ambiguous people’s lives are, how they struggle with things, a real sense of what morality is about.” Marsh sees the dependence on celebrity, the sense of giving too much of yourself, and the false intimacy from being in front of the camera as pitfalls that result from being on these shows, especially in younger people. A positive that has come out of one such show was the openness that came from Pedro Zamora’s battle with the AIDS virus on “The Real World: San Francisco,” Marsh said. “That really opened up the discussion for people and made them more comfortable with that idea,” she said, “and I think in that way, that sort of voyeurism can be positive.” The nature of the show also is a factor in whether it possesses any redeeming qualities, Coon said. On “Survivor,” if certain groups of people can work together successfully and accomplish something positive, then there is a positive emphasis in regards to team work, he said. “The flip side of that, of course, is that you can gang up,” Coon said. “You can form cliques or coalitions and you can basically blackball some other folks. Maybe there’s a little bit of that going on with the `Survivor.'” There could also be negative aspects to these shows that would impact both the participants of the show and the viewers, Coon said. Participants involved in the show could possibly be exposed to the camera for such a long period of time that they forget about its presence and the production elements of the show and their real personality traits begin to surface. “Once they become comfortable and really start focusing on themselves as participants in some real life event, then I think their own personalities begin to emerge and then I think for some people that’s a negative,” Coon said. Beell added that once the casts adjust to the cameras and production crews that track them, then this becomes their world and how they react to the challenges before them, although contrived, is probably real. “These kinds of situations, these personal relationships and so on could actually happen in real life, but you wouldn’t have your camera there and you wouldn’t have five years to wait for this to happen. You have to speed it up,” he said. “So how do you do it? Well, you keep them in this cocoon and you just increase the pressure. So whatever human emotion that occurs happens in the time frame that you have to work with. So it’s real, in a way.” Though he thinks reality shows are entertaining and interesting, Beell said he doesn’t think they hurt anyone, and there might be some positive benefits that emerge through watching these programs. “It might even reveal to the viewers things about themselves [and how they interact with people in their everyday lives],” he said. However, when viewers unconsciously believe that they are witnessing things they shouldn’t be, then it casts what you are viewing in a negative light, Coon said. “I think that it allows people to make very quick judgments for good or for bad and just say these people, this is exactly how they are, and I’ve made up my mind whether I like them or I don’t like them,” he said. Though the term voyeurism has a negative stigma to it, it is something that occurs daily, Beell said. “We are breaking people’s privacy all the time. Maybe that’s the price we pay to be in an open society,” he said. “I think that we have to allow a certain amount of openness in our society so that if we can function, we don’t have this secret society where everyone is afraid to have interchanges with others.” Viewing these types of programs might decrease the urge to snoop into other people’s lives rather than encourage the behavior, Beell added. Marsh said cast members on such shows experience some after effects after the final filming of the show. “I think afterwards, after doing the show, they had somewhat of a hang over,” she said, “feeling that they gave away something intimate about themselves. That they didn’t realize in some measure what they were doing, but in another measure they do realize that they are going to be very edited.” The reason cast members participate in these shows is to gain success and celebrity in a time and economy when both are important, Marsh said. Some of the cast members even grow to be dependent on the experience, she said. “I think that in that sense kids get used to it fairly quickly and not only get used to it, but actually grow fairly dependent on it and feel that they need that reflection of themselves in order to sort of feel that they are living their lives. So for me, that’s sort of a bit of a danger of these shows, is that you do become very dependent on that reflective image in the camera,” Marsh said. Violent Misrepresentation

Brad Bushman, associate professor of psychology, said there is an assumption that violent television programs, such as “America’s Most Wanted” and “COPS,” draw higher ratings than non-violent programs, but that is not the case. “I think there’s this assumption that if it bleeds, then it leads,” he said. “If anything Nielson Ratings are lower for violent programs than for non-violent programs, but violent programs are easy to export.” Bushman cited a study comparing the crime rates in reality-based shows such as “COPS” and “America’s Most Wanted” with the rates from the FBI uniform crime report found that the rates distorted reality. “About 87 percent of the crimes occurring in the real world are property crimes, whereas only 13 percent of the crimes occurring in reality based TV programs are property crimes,” he said. Bushman said the largest discrepancy was found to be murder, where in the real world, only 0.2 percent of the crimes reported by the FBI are murders, but in reality based programs, about 50 percent of the crimes shown are murders. “So it provides this distorted view of reality, that the world is a very violent place,” he said. “These are supposed to be reality based programs when in fact, they don’t reflect reality at all.” “Real world violence is more likely to increase violence in viewers than fictitious violence, except for very young viewers who can’t distinguish reality from fantasy,” he said. “I would say these programs are not beneficial to society. They probably increase the level of violence and aggression in society.” Voyeuristic Society, Corporate America

Reality based television shows say many things about our society, Coon said. “I think it says that we tend to succumb to the voyeurism tendencies of our personalities, that we sometimes tend to root for people to either win or to lose,” he said. The attraction of real life individuals has a certain appeal, Coon added. “We realize that these folks are not fictional characters, that they are really truly people that we could run into on the street,” he said. Marsh said she believes these shows speak of pop culture right now, which is really corporate. Even though it appears you are really seeing the heart of America, there is a lot of product placement and corporate sponsorship going on with shows like “The Real World.” “These programs are created to sell. They are created to make money and to do well for these networks to bring in cash,” she said. “So I think in terms of them being pure documentary, that needs to be really well understood, and I would say that as a blanket statement about pop culture in general is that a lot of it is about bringing in the buck, more than ever.” For more information check the following:

began the reality craze in the late 1980’s following the boys in blue on high-speed chases and any other crime imaginable. “America’s Most Wanted” has helped to apprehend some of America’s most ruthless criminals. “The Real World” placed seven strangers in a loft to record their interactions, which turned out to be anything but friendly at times. “Road Rules” had six people cross the country in an RV to compete for prizes. “Survivor” stranded 16 people on an island in the South China Sea for 39 days and a chance at $1 million. “Big Brother”cut 10 people off from society to compete to be the last person expelled from the house and the winner of $500,000. “American High” followed high school students in Highland Park, Ill., but was canceled after two weeks. “The Mole” will place 10 people in a foreign land with one mole secretly trying to sabotage the group’s every effort to win the final cash prize.