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Reality Check
Reality Check
Amid the shock, mourning and anger that immediately followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, came calls from experts that these awful events had changed America — even the world — and that nothing would ever be the same. Our sense of security had been shattered, they said — and so it had been, and in many ways is still.
Scholars and media pundits also argued that our very culture would change irrevocably. An end to the “Age of Irony” was declared, and critics mused that terror-driven films would flop. So-called reality television, however, perhaps suffered the biggest sucker-punch, with critics suggesting that after having ‘reality TV” horrifically redefined, Americans would have no appetite for watching bikini-clad models scarf down live crickets. Indeed, the conventional cultural wisdom was that reality TV, so promising on Sept. 10, was unwelcome in America on Sept. 12. As The New Orleans Times-Picayune’s Dave Walker summed up a month after the attacks, “Pundits galore have speculated that the horrible reality of that and subsequent days permanently dulled our appetite for the contrived drama, teasing sexuality and synthetic peril of “reality” television.” Yet despite the failure of a handful of reality shows immediately after Sept. 11, such predictions have not come to pass. In fact, a year and a half after the Twin Towers fell, the genre is bigger than ever, with six reality programs placing in the Nielsen ratings’ Top 20 in mid-February, including 40 million viewers for the finale of Joe Millionaire and 23.3 million for the Feb. 13 debut of Survivor: The Amazon – higher than the premiere episodes of that show’s previous two incarnations and beating, for the first time since May 2001, a new episode of Friends. It is, therefore, apparent that Sept. 11 did not sound the death knell for reality television. In fact, the genre’s temporary lull in popularity may have had other causes. Maybe Sept. 11 didn’t change our culture that much, if at all.
Jumping to Conclusions
There were indeed signs soon after the attacks that reality TV was in trouble, that seeing someone dubbed a “Survivor” for simply enduring 39 days on an island while surrounded by cameras suddenly seemed stupid. For instance, a poll by Initiative Media conducted Sept. 21 to 23, 2001, found that just 17 percent of respondents were likely to watch reality TV shows, compared with 57 percent who said they would watch comedies. A similar poll by the same firm Oct. 10 found that 83 percent of Americans were less interested in reality TV after Sept. 11. The Nielsen ratings bore this trend out: Several long-running sitcoms, including Everybody Loves Raymond and Becker, saw ratings bumps in the months after the attacks. Most prominently, from mid-September to late October 2001, Friends averaged 29.1 million viewers, up from an average of 23.6 million the prior season. Moreover, it beat Survivor: Africa in head-to-head competition week after week in fall 2001 — a far cry from the pre-terrorism world that was spring 2001, when Friends was thumped in the ratings by Survivor: The Australian Outback, which was the top show of the 2000-2001 season (with multiple editions of the ABC game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire not far behind). “Watching Friends is like watching Gomer Pyle during the Vietnam War,” Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, told The New York Times in October 2001. “It was terribly comforting to watch Marines not fight any battles. Just as it’s terribly comforting to watch Ross and Rachel not mourn the loss of any friends.” Friends’ executive producer, Kevin Bright, concurred, and was quoted as saying ‘the renewed popularity of the series was probably linked to the events on Sept. 11. “It’s like going back to comfort food.”"
Survivor’s plummet in ratings (from about 30 million viewers a week for Season Two’s Outback to about 20 million for the following season of Survivor: Africa), coupled with the absolute failure of other reality fare such as The Mole 2: The Next Betrayal, Temptation Island 2, and Lost, and low ratings for the heavily hyped and critically lauded The Amazing Race, certainly portended a drop in the genre’s appeal when compared with Friends’ upswing. Linking it all directly to Sept. 11, however, was perhaps too simplistic — even if the psychological impact of the attacks sent Americans scurrying to find a fluffy escape, however temporary, from the real real world’s woes. Indeed, a mostly overlooked problem was the sudden glut of reality fare that began in the weeks before Sept. 11. At least one prominent critic realized this at the time: Blaming reality TV’s decline on Sept. 11 is tempting and “an easy argument to make, as there’s no way to disprove it,” wrote USA Today’s Robert Bianco Oct. 25, 2001. “But before we tackle a sociological explanation, we should first consider a simpler, ordinary TV explanation: There were too many reality shows at once, and too many of them were lousy. The truth is, the networks have done what they always do — taken a good idea and beaten it until we’re senseless.” And Entertainment Weekly, in late October 2001, reported that ‘most industry insiders blame [reality TV's decline on an] oversaturation that came when a white-hot trend coincided with a network buying frenzy — on the eve of a threatened strike by writers and actors. Poor scheduling hasn’t helped.” Consider that the ratings for NBC’s Lost, in which contestants dropped in the middle of nowhere had to find their way to the Statue of Liberty, were in the tank even before Sept. 11 — the show debuted just before the tragedies, and then subsequent episodes had to be delayed. Those episodes scored even worse. However, this isn’t necessarily because Americans decided the show was irrelevant. Perhaps viewers who checked out the premiere did not like what they saw (it did receive poor reviews). Or perhaps, given the long gap between the premiere episode and subsequent ones because of non-stop news coverage, viewers simply forgot about the show or lost interest. Other shows that debuted prior to Sept. 11 also did poorly. CBS’s Amazing Race, a fast-paced reality show in a difficult time slot (opposite NBC’s The West Wing) that had gotten outstanding advance reviews, “kicked off Sept. 5 with 11.8 million viewers and a 13 share. “Everyone was expecting a 19 or a 21, minimum,” says one rival network exec,” according to Entertainment Weekly. During the summer, Fox’s Murder in Small Town X, a reality show that may have been too convoluted for its own good, flopped. (In yet another reality TV-meets-reality twist, that show’s winner, a New York City firefighter, died Sept. 11.) Even Survivor: The Australian Outback’s numbers in spring 2001 had begun to slip toward the end of the season, while Survivor: Africa may have fell victim in part to having less hype and publicity than its predecessors — that was, at least, CBS” argument. And although ABC’s well-reviewed The Mole 2: The Next Betrayal was put on hiatus after a terrible ratings performance, the problem may have been its equally terrible Friday night time slot.
The Ratings Reality
If Sept. 11 was not fully responsible for reality television’s temporary decline, could it also have had little to do with the rise of sitcoms? Though Friends was quickly termed "comfort food," its spike in audience numbers was certainly aided by the show’s May 2001 cliffhanger, which implied that character Rachel was pregnant. The first episodes of the new season confirmed this and revealed the father to be Ross — whose star-crossed, on-again, off-again relationship with Rachel had been the show’s emotional core since its early days. Friends fans recognized this, and so did critics, who hailed the series as rejuvenated creatively as well (something confirmed when it won the 2001-2002 Best Comedy Series Emmy months later). While sitcoms such as Everybody Loves Raymond and Becker also increased their ratings post-Sept. 11 (as did “patriotic” dramas such as The West Wing and JAG), other comedies suffered. Spin City shed millions of viewers from its 2000-2001 average, and Will and Grace’s numbers also dropped. The series’ respective networks attributed the declines to Spin City involving a dim-witted New York City mayor (possibly inappropriate with Rudy Giuliani in the spotlight) and Will and Grace being up against emergent smash CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, according to the Times.
Despite this, many critics were content to pronounce reality TV’s goose cooked. Bigwigs such as NBC’s Jeff Zucker may have stressed (in The Washington Post, no less) that “I think it would be an overreaction to say this is the end of reality [television] … the good unscripted shows will endure,” but newspapers were still overrun with similar-sounding headlines, such as “Will This Fall’s Spy Dramas and Reality Shows Find an Audience?”; “Can Networks Keep “Reality” Shows Afloat?”; “Will Survivor Survive?”; “Survivor Heads to Kenya, But Will Americans Tune In?”; and “Suddenly, “Reality” TV is too ” Real.” As it turned out, reports of the genre’s death were greatly exaggerated. Survivor lost its ratings lead to Friends, but still nabbed upwards of 20 million viewers a week, with Survivor: Africa the No. 5 show of the 2001-2002 season and the next edition, Survivor: Marquesas, even more successful at No. 4 (the fall 2002 edition, Survivor: Thailand, was panned as boring yet topped Marquesas’ viewership). In spring 2002, ABC’s The Bachelor was a hit, MTV’s The Real World was grabbing its biggest ratings ever, and that network’s The Osbournes became its highest-rated series of all time and a cultural phenomenon (albeit not on the scale of the original Survivor or Who Wants to be a Millionaire). In recent weeks, things have exploded — with Joe Millionaire’s finale the highest-rated non-sports show of the season and Survivor: The Amazon even beating new episodes of Friends its first two week on the air. From Feb. 3 to March 9, 2003, reality shows filled five to six slots on the Nielsen ratings’ weekly Top 20 shows, according to number of overall viewers. The following chart illustrates this, along with the rankings of three selected other shows for comparison:
*American Idol airs a new episode twice a week. Clearly then, reality television has come to practically dominate prime-time television. In fact, during the first week in February, ‘the six broadcast networks showed 14.5 hours of unscripted entertainment, representing 14 percent of their schedules. That total, which includes game shows and older reality shows such as ” Cops but not news programs or specials, was up from eight hours during the same week last year,” according to The New York Times. The same publications that dismissed reality TV after Sept. 11 are now trumpeting its return to prominence (The Washington Post even had a related front-page story Feb. 17). So, what happened? Did reality shows decline in the short-term post-Sept. 11 specifically because of Sept. 11, or because of a glut of low-quality fare? Most likely it is a mix of both — the survey results detailed earlier are too one-sided to be anomalous, and several shows did experience unmistakable drop-offs. But one wonders, too, how much of this was driven by the media’s ’spin” that reality TV was over: Did people think they did not want to watch reality TV because everyone in the news media was telling them that they didn’t want to? Whatever the case, reality TV is back with a vengeance — an indication that whatever “changed” culturally after Sept. 11, the effect was only temporary. Additionally, ratings for the Fox series 24, which focuses heavily on a terrorist threat, have increased significantly from last season, while the more patriotic The West Wing has seen its ratings plummet 25 percent during the same time period — it’s also often up against the successful reality repertory of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. In “Hollywood Searches for a New Script,” one of the few academic pieces online thus far regarding popular culture after Sept. 11, conservative John Podhoretz writes, “I believe the stark reality of a nation attacked has shaken the popular culture to its foundations. American institutions were the object of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Hollywood is sensing that it can no longer comfortably use them as a standard-issue villain. The popular culture needs a new plotline.” Podhoretz’s argument would scarcely have been criticized at the time he wrote it in the fog of war, before the cultural dust had settled (and perhaps it still has not). But his claim that American institutions can’t be used antagonistically after Sept. 11 is disproven by the fact that on 24, the fictionalized National Security Agency seems to have covered up a plot to blow up Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Michael Chiklis won an Emmy and Golden Globe for his role as a corrupt cop on The Shield (which won a Best Drama Series Golden Globe in January 2003, beating, among others, The West Wing), and, in theaters, Ray Liotta plays a lying police detective in Narc. On a recent episode of The Shield, a morally ambivalent police officer helps a firefighter friend find the women’s shelter where his estranged wife is staying, and the fireman then goes there and brutally murders his wife and several others. The policeman refuses to confess his role in the tragedy in order to save his job. Perhaps The Shield’s writers were merely trying to play off the newfound image of cops and firefighters as heroes after Sept. 11, but in any case, this and other examples contradict Podohertz’s argument. (In fact, recently some critics have taken the opposite tack, blaming the effects of Sept. 11 for the rise of reality TV — Newsweek’s Anna Quindlen, for instance.) And so it seems our culture has more or less returned to where it was before Sept. 11, 2001 — there has been no grand shift in our collective conscience, exemplified by the re-proliferation of reality television programming. Still, many remain unconvinced the genre will last: “Signs of incipient decline are clear,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Johnson Jan. 16, 2003. “Reality is already cannibalizing itself; participants in one show admitted at the press tour to out-and-out fraud. Questions arise that the genre is inherently less valuable (especially in terms of advertising) to networks than more traditional television, and that, except for Survivor, it has yet to [be proved] that any network reality show can endure.” In other words, reality TV may have been losing its immunity idol in the weeks leading up to, and especially following, Sept. 11, but since then, it has regained it. It only remains to be seen for how long. P O P F O R U M Chris Wright, an editor and writer in the Washington, D.C., area, is pursuing a master’s degree in communication, culture and technology at Georgetown University. He previously wrote about American Candidate and has reported extensively on Survivor.
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