Word: survivors
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...Times have changed. NBC's upfront presentation this year was almost entirely irony-free. Beginning with a cornball montage of classic moments in the network's history, NBC kept a relentlessly upbeat message (remember: "Survivor" did no harm on Thursday night! None!) that bespoke the nervousness throughout the industry about the soft ad market. Execs invoked the golden days of big-network television, reaching a ludicrous apex when West Coast president Scott Sassa likened "Weakest Link" host Anne Robinson to Groucho Marx. At times, NBC's pageant of self-butt-kissing even contradicted itself, as when Zucker's old "Today...
...Have we learned anything? Last season we saw that the reality trend wasn't just limited to "Survivor," and that last year's favorite programming crutch - building star vehicles around big stars - was as lame and misguided as you'd have thought. This week, the emphasis will be on sitcoms and dramas, but with reality shows ready to be thrown in as soon as those series fail. Meanwhile, the first murmurs we're hearing about network schedules have sitcom and drama vehicles in the works for Richard Dreyfuss, Ellen DeGeneres, Jason Alexander and on NBC - and I only wish...
...glaring disparities among other minority groups, but now that the media light's been off this issue for a while, one wonders whether the networks will have made any more progress this year - and whether the press will care, or just pepper execs with hard-hitting questions about where "Survivor 4" will be held...
Reality TV is supposed to coarsen the culture, accelerating America's highly anticipated slide into the Sodom-Gomorrah metropolitan area. Survivor: The Australian Outback proved to be a huge letdown. TINA WESSON, sweet part-time nurse from Tennessee, took the million dollars, but sensitivity flowed from the other finalists too: COLBY DONALDSON (weepy mama's boy), RODGER BINGHAM (weepy schoolteacher), ELISABETH FILARSKI (weepy outback nymph) and KEITH FAMIE (just plain weepy--he broke down on live TV to propose marriage to his girlfriend). "I wanted it to be a kinder game," said Wesson, of the unfortunate lack of backstabbing...
...must take issue with James Poniewozik's apologia for reality-TV programs and his view that they teach morality lessons [TELEVISION, April 23]. Programs like Big Brother and Survivor are not group therapy. Nor do they transmit any morals. They are an exhibition of what happens when contestants allow themselves to be showcased in an artificial environment in which they are likely to form emotional attachments while being required to inflict hurt and humiliation on one another. Rather than ask what message these shows send to their viewers, one should consider what irreparable damage they will, over time, cause...