Are+Reality+Shows+coming+up+aginst+a+harsh+Reality?

= = = = =**Are Reality Shows coming up against a harsh Reality?**=

[|even heroes cry]

In 2000, Italian TV was to meet with a radically new kind of entertainment. “Il Grande Fratello 1” was broadcasted on September and nobody, not even the high-brow intellectuals could help being somehow involved. The event was supposed to upset both entertainment and communication. At first it was so odd for a tv-watcher sensing to be a voyeur and a downright intruder (but one who had been given formal permission by the programme rivals themselves!) that it was almost compelling to take a peek: each of us assumed that real life was being broadcasted and it had to be interesting –aside from the unhealthy craving for entering private lives- to see common life from a detached vantage point.

Throughout the past seven years, these kind of broadcastings have showed an increasing loss of interest among the audience. As a consequence, formats have changed. “Il Grande Fratello” (12 perfectly unknown girls and boys acting in a perfectly unclever way) tries to hang on (not without efforts), but has to compete with “La Pupa e il Secchione” (clever ugly boys facing teasing, stupid, beautiful girls), “La Fattoria” ( former famous people working as farmers and cursing at each other), “Circus” (former famous people hanging from a rope and cursing at each other), “L’Isola dei Famosi”( f.f.p. struggling to survive on each other's expense in a desert island….and meanwhile cursing at each other!).

The issue is of course a matter to be laughed at by now, but nevertheless the very bugs that haunt these TV-programmes have ended up unfolding to all of us who are willing to investigate them, the way we sense our life matched with the way life is told to us. Since science entered our civilization, the epic narrative has ceased to be attractive; the twilight of the heroes has opened the door to two major kinds of narrative others than the epic one: the first kind has taken over the epic mode by telling the adventures and the impossible undertakings of greatly gifted human beings or extraordinary man. This genre seems to survive in these kind of stories even if the audience is now well aware that it is watching a delightful lie. The charm of these stories lies in the lives of the characters - invented, impossible lives.

The second kind of story we take delight in is the account of the events of common people’s life. What matters here is the way the narrative is plotted, the carefully wrought sequence of the events; we are not interested in an ordinary man’s life for his own sake. For example, who cares about the life of, say, Leopold Bloom? The plot may be compelling, but Leopold…..is Leopold, nothing more.

To get back to Reality Shows, it seems they have failed to suit any of these two patterns of story with which we are acquainted and which seem to be the only ones worth a “momentary suspension of disbelief”. Each of us will admit there is nothing extraordinary in the characters that are brought forth to us while watching these shows (even if that tremendous amount of ignorance, those displays of private thoughts, feelings, emotions, sexual attitudes might sound amazing!), and that is the reason why RS can’t fall into the first kind of modern narrative. What is more, they can hardly suit those with a plot. Hard though movie editors and directors may work, they’ll never be able to turn real life into an entertaining, delightful sequence, to tear to pieces twenty-four hours until they resemble something like a movie or a sitcom episode. Real Life can only be lived (and it’s worth being lived!) in the present: when told, at its worst, it gets deadly.