Television today is becoming more complex and more diverse. There are all sorts of genres on television to choose from, such as game shows, soap operas, reality shows, and many more. I like to watch different types of shows, but I haven't watched too many reality shows. Just recently I started to watch the reality show Real World/ Road Rules Challenge: The Duel 2.
The Real World/ Road Rules Ch
allenge: The Duel 2 is about twenty-six competitors competing for 300,000 dollars. The show consists of thirteen men and thirteen women. Each week the contestants must complete a challenge, the first female and male to finish wins the challenge and is safe from the duel. The contestants then vote to see who will go into the Duel and the last female and male not voted goes into the duel. They then get to choose who they want to Duel against. Each week two competitors are eliminated, until there is one person left. For the competitors there is a lot of drama and backstabbing along the way to get to the top.Steve Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter , believes video games and television have become more complex and are actually good for the video game players and television watchers, rather than bad for them. Steve Johnson describes how television shows have become more complex because they contain many different story lines, which is known as Multi-threading. He also describes character mapping, where you take the characters, and draw a diagram connecting them to one another, to make show the complexity of the show. Signs that help tell what will happen next, also known as flashing arrows, Johnson says television is steering away from flashing arrows. Johnson came up with the Sleeper Curve, to show as the various mediums evolves, they getting more challenging, rather than just going for the cheap thrill.
Johnson tells how we are not following reality tv for its multiple threads, but the multiple relationships of the characters. Johnson says “Just as The Sopranos challenges the mind to follow multiple threads, the reality shows demand that we track multiple relationships, since the action of these shows revolves around the shifting feuds and alliances between more than a dozen individuals”(107). Johnson also say this “activates our social intelligence and emotional IQ”(107). Johnson tells how reality would be “better viewed as visualized as a network: a series of points connected by lines of affiliation”(108). “When we watch most reality shows, we are implicitly building these social network maps in our heads, a map not so much of plotlines as of attitudes: Nick has a thing for Amy, but Amy may just be using Nick; Bill and Kwame have a competitive friendship"(108).
Real World/ Road Rules Challenge: The Duel 2 sometimes shows examples of the Sleeper Curve. The first episode started off with the contestants finding out who they were competing against, and had a high level of drama. Before the first challenge even started there was a fight between two contestants. The show then had to bring in two new contestants, right at the start of the first challenge. Someone arguing for the Sleeper Curve could say the fight is adding to the storyline or Multi-Thread making the show more complex. As a result of the fight there were different turns and twists in this episode such as the elimination of contestants and the addition of contestants making the show more complex.
All the contestants of the Duel 2 were casts of another Real World in the past. Many of the contestants also participated in a Real World Challenge, so many of the contestant knew each other. With this being a continuation of the past Real Worlds, it sometimes can be hard to follow the episodes plot, for instance the show starts off with a contestant saying she had to get the knife out of her back because of the backstabbing two past contestants did to her. In a past story from other Real Worlds two female contestants that dated in a past Real World, ignores each other the first half of an episode, but then hooks up in the last part of the episode. The continuation is adding to the complexity of the show making you think when a contestant refers to an event in a past show, and it's adding to the Multi-Thread.
Someone arguing the Real World/ Road Rules Challenge: The Duel 2 does not support the SleeperCurve could say there is just a bunch of money-hungry people trying to do what ever they can to get the prize money. Someone arguing the show does not support the SleepersCurve can say the fight that happened in the first episode was to draw viewers and increase ratings. According to Robert Seidman “ averaged 1.8 million viewers, ahead of its 1.69M season-to-date average and ruled prime-time on cable with people aged 12-34, and was the number one show on cable all day with females 12-34.It had a 1.82 P12-34 coverage rating, a season high and also had a season high with females 18-24.” The show contains a lot of drama that some would say is good for the shows ratings. There is perhaps no complexity in that. The show sometimes contains flashing arrows, that help to predict what will happen next. Johnson says “It's a kind of narrative signpost, planted conveniently to help the audience keep track of what is going on"(73). The show focuses on a number of contestants at a time, mainly the contestants that are going into the Duel. When the show focuses on a contestant that you rarely see, then you can predict that contestant is going into the duel or will be challenged by someone in the Duel. According to Johnson, television is steering away from the use of flashing arrows, although the Real World/ Road Rules Challenge: The Duel 2 is not.
Suzanne Sleeper, a Detroit Reality TV Examiner, wrote this on Examiner.com about the Real World/ Road Rules Challenge: The Duel 2:
“The top alliances remained strong last week on the Duel 2, but could they keep it up this week? Honestly, this season has been boring compared to past seasons of the Real World/Road Rules challenge because it's just been too dang predictable! All the "top dogs" in their alliance have been skating through week after week eliminating people as they choose.” There is no complexity in the show being predictable and you being able to guess who is going home next.
Dana Stevens wrote an article entitled “Thinking Outside the Idiot Box Does watching TV make you smarter? Duh ... I dunno”. She disagrees with Johnson's position that television makes us smarter. Dana quotes this about the show 24 “Not only does Johnson fail to account for the impact of the 16 minutes' worth of commercials that interrupt any given episode of, say, (a show he singles out as particularly "nutritional"), but he breezily dismisses recent controversies about that program's representation of Muslim terrorists or its implicit endorsement of torture, preferring to concentrate on how the show's formal structure teaches us to "pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships." Wait a minute—isn't a fictional program's connection to real-life political events like torture and racial profiling one of the "social relationships" we should be paying attention ? is the perfect example of a TV show that challenges its audience's cognitive faculties with intricate plotlines and rapid-fire information while actively discouraging them from thinking too much about the vigilante ethic it portrays. It's really good at teaching you to think … about future episodes of 24”. Like the show 24 the Real World/ Road Rules Challenge: The Duel 2 the show contains lots of commercials and the show get you to think about the upcoming episode. The first episode didn’t complete the first Duel, the episode was to be continued.
So whether or not Real World/ Road Rules Challenge: The Duel 2 supports the Sleeper Curve can be argued two ways. Someone can say the show contains Multi-Threads and Character mapping that makes the show more complex. Or someone can say it is just a bunch of money hungry people competing for money, there is not complexity in that. Someone could say the character mapping is a continuation of past Real Worlds making the show more complex. Some of the plots continue from episode to episode making you think about the upcoming episode.
Works Cited
Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good for You. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2005.
Sleeper, Suzanne. Examiner: The Duel 2 Episode 6: Can you mix it up already!. 16 May 2009. http://www.examiner.com/x-7608-Detroit-Reality-TV-Examiner~y2009m5d14-The-Duel-2-Episode-6
Stevens, Dana. Thinking Outside the Idiot Box Does watching TV make you smarter? Duh ... I dunno. 15 May 2009. http://www.slate.com/id/2117395/.
Seidman, Robert. Real World / Road Rules Challenges: The Duel II scores season high on Wednesday night. 2 June 2009. http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/06/04/real-world-road-rules-challenges-the-duel-ii-scores-season-high-on-wednesday-night/20087.
No comments:
Post a Comment