The recession catches up to reality TV

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 0 Comments

A new batch of reality shows is facing up to the fact we live in difficult times

GPhoto Illustration by Lauren Cattermole/Maclean's

Network executives think we want escapism in scripted TV: “Strategically,” ABC president Paul Lee told critics, “these are times when fairy tales play strongly.” But don’t tell that to the creators of reality shows.

The cheapest, quickest profit-making shows on television are facing up to the fact that we live in depressing times. In addition to the usual shows about weddings and failed relationships, cable networks have spent the last two years developing programs like Pawn Stars and Hardcore Pawn, the stories of pawnshops and the people who have to sell their stuff there. If you’d prefer to watch people buy things instead of selling them, Extreme Couponing has become a hit by featuring shoppers who try to get all the discounts they can, even if it means they have to stockpile detergent and toilet paper. Viewers may not be interested in escaping into a world of wealth and beauty; Simon Lloyd, CEO of reality-show producer Cineflix, told Maclean’s that today’s audiences “want to get value for money.”

The reality shows of the ’00s were often as escapist as today’s scripted shows, especially when it came to housing: Flip This House and its cousins told us there was a fortune to be made, while makeover shows emphasized the dream of living well. But today, because many people have less outsized ambitions, reality producers have moved to taking on more realistic dreams. The most popular reality sub-genre at the moment is the hoarder show, where the best anyone can do is move out of squalor.

Other recent shows acknowledge that we’ve given up hoping the future will be better than the past. In the Cineflix show American Pickers, and its spinoff Canadian Pickers, two men come into people’s homes and try to find valuable antiques among the old junk. Lloyd says that part of the appeal is that “a lot of things that are being bought and sold are from an era when times were good. There’s very much an element of nostalgia there. People aren’t buying things from the 1930s.”

Shows about getting rich quick have either died out or been forced to adapt to the new world. Flipping Out, finishing up its fifth season with solid ratings, began in 2007 as part of the house-flipping genre, with the star, Jeff Lewis, trying to make a fortune. After the housing market collapsed, we saw Lewis cut back his business and take on extra duties to stay afloat. Another recession-era take on house flipping, Flip Men, has its stars buying problematic homes at today’s rock-bottom prices; Lloyd’s company has one called The Unsellables about houses that can’t sell. “That was very much developed in relation to the credit crunch.”

All these shows taken together could seem depressing, but they certainly can’t be accused of being out of step with the times, and timeliness equals profitability. When Hayley Taylor created a North American version of her show The Fairy Jobmother, where she helps unemployed people find jobs, she chirped to Reuters that the timing was “absolutely perfect.” And unlike most modern scripted shows, viewers can go to these reality shows to get some direct engagement with current issues. Most scriptwriters haven’t noticed that, as CNN’s Paul R. La Monica wrote, “demand for storage and apartments is increasing even as rental rates go up.” But reality shows have noticed: Storage Wars, about what happens to people’s storage units after they don’t pay the rent, is on its way to becoming one of the defining shows of the new era.

There are a few scripted producers who have taken the hint and started to incorporate some of this material into their work. Michael Patrick King, who produced the boom-times show Sex and the City, has returned with 2 Broke Girls, which announces its intention in the title, though it’s been mocked for its inaccurate understanding of what it means to be poor. Two other recent comedies, The Middle and Raising Hope, focus on lower middle-class families that sometimes have to think carefully about their expenses. It may take a while, but the rest of the industry may start following reality TV’s lead in dealing with the bad financial situation. If economic forecasts are right, they’ll have plenty of time to catch up.

Sitcoms: Triumph of the Linear

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 2:03 PM - 0 Comments

“The Middle” was always going to get picked up for a third season (it’s doing quite well in a difficult time slot), but I’m glad ABC showed its confidence in it by making it one of the shows that got an early renewal (along with Modern Family, Cougar Town, Private Practice, and so on). It’s by far my favourite comedy in ABC’s Wednesday lineup, and probably the comedy I find the most solid and satisfying — it doesn’t hit the heights of some other shows, but it doesn’t have many weak links, either.

So many comedies at the moment are “yes, but” shows: yes, but they’re wildly uneven, yes, but this or that character is weak, yes, but they’re preachy and heavy-handed at times, yes, but there’s too many romantic subplots. The Middle has a narrow focus that appears to be getting narrower as it goes on: the most recent episode had a very simple story and only a small “B” story that felt very well integrated with the primary plot. The five main characters are all funny without being completely unreal, and the Neil Flynn character, in particular, is one of my favourite current characters. Most TV comedy characters are basically written as overgrown children, and he’s not. He’s not a boring paragon of virtue either, even though he can sound that way when he’s described; as written, and especially has played, he’s one of the few male characters around who is both eccentric (which comic characters need to be) and recognizably a grown-up. Plus the most recent episode offered one of my favourite comedy lines: Patricia Heaton and Flynn, satisfied that they’ve finally gained control of their kids, go out to see “The Little River Band Cover Band.” That line sounds funny and gets funnier every time it’s repeated, it’s a pop-culture joke, and it’s also a character joke about who these people are, what generation they’re from, and what entertainment they can afford.

The show that follows The Middle, Better With You, isn’t in that league, but it’s getting slowly, slowly better. Surprisingly, the strongest link in the cast is the guy I originally thought was just there to be the pretty young guy, Jake Lacy. The writers have actually figured out how to give him lines that are funny without being generic wisecracks. It’s still uneven, not just from episode but from scene to scene, but I root for it, partly because it’s the only four-camera comedy outside CBS (and therefore is in a very difficult position in an otherwise all-single-camera lineup) but mostly because it just has an air of likability and a sense that it’s getting better rather than worse. Between The Middle‘s strength and watching BWY’s slow and conscientious crawl toward self-improvement, I enjoy this lower-rated hour in ABC’s comedy lineup more than the Modern Family/Cougar Town hour. (Actually, The Middle and even BWY got more total viewers than Cougar Town last week, though that doesn’t matter in terms of 18-49 ratings and doesn’t prove anything bad about Cougar Town. I just bring it up to note that The Middle is even more popular than its pretty good 18-49 ratings would suggest.)

Now, here’s what the subject heading’s about: The Middle and BWY are examples of how non-linear storytelling seems to be quietly falling out of fashion in TV comedy, after being the biggest thing ever for only a few years. Better With You began as a How I Met Your Mother imitator in terms of style (they still have their share of knockoff moments), including lots of flashbacks and cutaways. These have been toned down to the point Continue…
The Pilot Exposition Theorem

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 10:38 AM - 3 Comments

Two comedy pilots for this season that didn’t exactly thrill me were what we might call the Back To You pair: The Middle, a single-camera quirk-com starring Patricia Heaton, and Hank, a multi-camera quirk-free comedy with Kelsey Grammer. The former incorporates too many clichés of its genre, like the abrasive tone, the voice-over narration, the wacky flashbacks, and the determination to give almost every character some kind of wacky dysfunction. It may get better, but it may not, since this is exactly the type of show that tends to burn itself out fast.

The latter is just a bog-standard comedy with an equally clichéd subject (a rich guy adjusting to not being rich; a guy moving back to his old home town), cursed with dull jokes and the usual dull direction from James Burrows, who has been coasting on his reputation for something like eight years now. It seems to depend on its topicality to sustain it — except that it’s no longer particularly topical. In real life, Grammer’s Hank wouldn’t have been forced to move to his old home town and adjust to a middle-class lifestyle, he’d have been bailed out and kept in charge of his company. And as I said in another post, the discussion of Obama’s “Yes We Can” slogan just screams “written in 2008.” Which is why trying to be topical and up-to-date rarely works, because a lot can change in a few months. (This doesn’t apply as much to topical allegory, like V, because the allegorical symbols don’t have to stand for any one thing, and the producers can adjust the writing to keep up with the times. But when a show has nothing going for it except topicality, it’s screwed as soon as anything changes anywhere in the world.)

One of the many problems with the pilot of Hank was the opening scene, which was so dull that I wouldn’t be surprised if they change it by the time it airs. It began with a prologue, showing Grammer and his wife moving out of their old apartment; they spend the scene delivering exposition by telling each other things they already know. It reminded me of an important rule I just made up arbitrarily: if a sitcom pilot begins in a different city from where the show will actually take place, simply for the purpose of showing us where the hero used to be before he moved to the main location of the show, beware. It’s not an absolute rule, of course; the makers of a show like this could rightly point out that The Beverly Hillbillies was one of the biggest hits of all time, and that show began with a prologue in the mountains. But sometimes, when a show has only a litle over 20+ minutes to tell its first story, and spends a chunk of that time on a set and location we will never see again, that could be a sign that there’s a bigger storytelling flaw in the show, or that the network didn’t have enough confidence in the concept to just let it begin at the beginning.

This even applies to shows that don’t start the pilot in the wrong city, but do start it on the wrong set. One of the reasons the pilot of The Big Bang Theory gave the impression of a show with a lot of problems and major flaws to work out (and a show that had been revised a lot before airing, which it was) was that it began not on the main set, but in a building we would never seen again on the show. The most confident-looking comedy pilots, the ones that give the impression of shows that know what they’re doing from the beginning, usually begin on the main set and drop the main character directly into the show’s world, like Diane walking into the Cheers bar. Even on How I Met Your Mother, a show which uses narration and time-jumping and stuff, the first scene in “our” time (after the first few seconds where Older Ted talks to his children) takes place in Ted’s apartment, and the next scene takes place in the bar. If the show catches on we’re going to be spending most of our time on these sets; we might as well see them immediately.