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Product Description
Product Description
In the late 1990s, the global television industry struck gold. The reality game shows Big Brother and Survivor became TV events that whipped up storms of controversy and changed the face of prime-time schedules. Subjecting their contestants to protracted seclusion from the outside world, the shows offered up a novel combination of the mundane and the extreme, inspiring countless imitations and almost as many law suits. Shooting People examines the emergence of the form, its relation to documentary and its place within a globalised TV industry. Sam Breton and Rueben Cohen draw parallels between methods employed to control contestants and techniques of interrogation honed by military intelligence. Exposing the dubious involvement of psychologists and psychotherapists in the reality TV business. This 'ultimate form of light entertainment' is also shown to be the perfect medium for an apolitical time that has displaced grand narratives with an obsessive focus on personality and trivia. It has been some forty years since television first decided a presidential election, in the legendary Nixon-Kennedy debates; if, in 2004, we should see the Republican and Democratic nominees debating alongside a third-party candidate given to the world by Messrs Murdoch and Cutler, elevating the game show to the level of a decisive electoral institution, the term 'reality TV', always dubious before, will have simply made itself redundant, 'reality' and 'television' turned interchangeable in an ultimate parody of democracy's aspirations to liberate humankind.
From the Author
Immensely topical, given the rash of car-crash TV that infects the schedules, this sustained polemic considers the history of the form, the TV industry's nervous wranglings over it, the often devastating psychological effects participation in a reality TV environment can have on the 'contestants', and the nefarious and ethically questionable influence of psychologists involved in the shows. The propaganda of the ordinary, elevated in an anti-ideological age to the role of prime narrative, also proves to be the perfect vehicle for the bullying assertions of heroism now pouring out of the military-industrial complex.
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
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73% buy the item featured on this page: Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV £12.00 |
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17% buy Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-First Century£14.74 |
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10% buy Reality TV£14.64 |
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