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While millions of Americans viewed marathon televised news coverage of the tragedy, there was a small group of citizens for whom this was not an option: the three remaining contestants on CBS’ "reality" show, Big Brother 2. From its inception, part of the promise and appeal of the internationally-popular TV concept/show has been that while houseguests reside in their heavily-surveilled compound, the outside world could change dramatically without their knowledge. This past week, that promise has been strongly tested, as CBS has had to decide how to handle the houseguests. Should it tell them of the events? Should it allow them access to media? Is it even appropriate to allow the show to continue? Such a situation, when juxtaposed with this week’s events, leads us to think about our role as viewers of both the very real, terrible spectacles we’ve witnessed this week and of "reality" shows like Big Brother that appeal to our desire for human drama. The American version of Big Brother is still slated to end Sept. 20, as originally scheduled. Because the show features live segments, and because the show’s moderator-host Julie Chen has been stranded in New York City, the episodes leading up to the finale, including another houseguest eviction, have not been broadcast as planned. (As of Sept. 17, the BB2 Web site had not been updated since the Sept. 6 live show.) A two-hour broadcast is scheduled for Sept. 18, which will likely show recorded footage from the past week. Unlike Big Brother producers in Belgium, Denmark and South Africa, the producers of the shows in America (and the Netherlands) decided to break the show’s policy of blocking information about current events, and told the houseguests about the terrorist attacks. It appears, however, from fan posts on realitytvfans.com, that the American houseguests weren’t immediately aware of the scale of the tragedy; viewers watching the show on the Internet live feed heard the houseguests speculate that maybe 100 to 200 people could have died. According to a Sept. 13 story in USA Today, the producers decided to inform the remaining three people sequestered in the California house when they learned that Tamitha Freeman, a cousin of houseguest Monica Bailey, was one of the missing World Trade Center workers. At that point, executive producer Arnold Shapiro said, "[I]t became defined for us as a family emergency. … But obviously the tragedy that happened in America far outdoes anything with the show." The BB2 producers have not compromised some of the show’s other restrictions, however. Houseguests have not been allowed access to any news media, and any communication with the outside world (e.g. messages to and from family members) has gone through the producers. (It should be noted that the houseguests may leave if they desire, but doing so means that they forfeit their chance to win the $500,000 prize at the end of the competition.) While one might think that this situation would increase viewing pleasure for the show’s audience — as the policy is enacted and put to the test — it has instead generated significant concern on the part of many of the show’s fans, who have posted open letters to CBS and have commented in forums at realitytvfans.com and realitynewsonline.com. Online responses to the network’s handling of the houseguest situation have included complaints about the shows’ no-media policy, calls to end the show (given fans’ concern for the houseguests and recognition that, after the tragedy, the viewing experience will be lessened or even meaningless), and suggestions for keeping viewers happy if the contest is aborted earlier than planned (here’s a sampling). Through these responses, viewers are checking their own desire to participate as voyeurs and to be entertained by the houseguests’ interpersonal dramas. One question we might raise, however, is how much would be accomplished by the cancellation of one show, especially given the fact that the houseguests are able to leave if they choose. As any person viewing current American "reality TV" genre offerings knows, the "reality" we’re viewing is quite artificial. As reality shows are framed as competitions, situated in isolated environments, edited for narrative arc, and full of fantastic challenges and demands, they are a far cry from viewers’ lived experiences. The reality offered us on these shows is mediated and interpreted for us before it reaches our TV set. And, as online fans note, that version of "reality" doesn’t work so well in our current cultural context. Instead, we’ve relied on the news media to provide us with televisual access to the tragedy, to the "real" events and their effects. While it’s important to make distinctions between the reality TV we view as entertainment and the viewing we’ve done this past week (and the two are by no means comparable), it’s difficult for some viewers, like myself, to watch the news coverage of the tragedy without an awareness of the filters used to create the reality-effects being deployed on popular shows now. By Thursday of last week, when the rate of breaking news developments had slowed, most network news broadcasts turned to victim and family testimonials to enhance their coverage of the crisis. After watching the footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center and of jumping workers more times than was necessary — and seeing the images edited and packaged with their own musical score — and after hearing repeated invocations of cinematic descriptives, and after wondering why more news coverage wasn’t devoted to contextualization of the geopolitical conditions that might have informed the terrorists’ horrible actions or to the harassment of Muslim and Arab Americans, it became difficult for me to view these testimonials as newsworthy. What they did provide, however, was the human dimension many audience members desire; a dimension that I would argue is a large part of what we crave when we turn on the TV to watch Big Brother: We watch to see how other people respond to difficult situations, to latch on to some part of their experience. Whether or not BB2 viewers watching the news recognize this similarity, or if it even matters to them, remains to be seen. Ian Albert is a freelance graphic artist living in Fort Collins, Colo. Related Sites |
