Scripted TV is in decline because reality TV has taken over the world
Big Brother returns, yet again, this week, but why do we need reality TV when TV is giving us reality?
This is not a new observation. In my lifetime, we have gone from cheering on or booing actors in dramas and soap operas – Dynasty, Dallas, Coronation Street, Brideshead Revisited – to watching people-as-brands, whose careers blend the scripted and unscripted. Look, because we have to, at Kim Kardashian, who parlayed a sextape into 20 years of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which has made stars of her sisters, husbands, mother and stepfather.
Not for nothing has Meghan, Duchess of Sussex gone back to her day job as a TV personality, except she’s not Meghan from Suits but Meghan from The Firm. I have no intention of watching her Netflix series, or even watch it to hate it, but the fact it has been made indicates that her mere presence is enough to get it commissioned. If Netflix had any gumption, they would make her watch paint dry, with her husband and kids popping up to ask if she wants some tea.
I watch so little TV these days, because I’m a print and radio guy, but outside of comedy and late-night US talk shows, I have little interest in doing so. I always think that TV drama, or competitions like Bake Off or The Apprentice, are the water cooler of the middle classes; when people rave about Bodyguard and Bridgerton, or Stranger Things and Squid Games, they are admitting to their friends and colleagues that they take the time to watch what other people are watching.
But increasingly it seems we’re all watching the world, and its politics, rather than a scripted story with character arcs and endings all mapped out. I still think the big story in the UK today is whether Fr Farage can achieve his (financial backers’) dreams and grab control of the legislature, although I am positive the Royal Family will stick their gloves on the tiller and ease right-wing figures away from representing them in Parliament.
That’s why our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are barristers, and why the Chancellor is a former Bank of England employee; her deputy, Darren Jones, is a lawyer too, as are a great many members of His Majesty’s Government. Can Labour, not the natural party of power, ride the waves of populism and mistrust into the 2030s, or will the support of media barons including Lachlan Murdoch, son of nonagenarian Rupert, and Sir Paul Marshall convince people to vote against their best interests and let the lunatics take over the asylum?
When Nigel Farage was paid £1.5m by ITV (the same people screening Big Brother this year) to take part in I’m A Celebrity, he knew this would increase his chances of winning over the people of Clacton; and this came six months before he announced he stood for the seat. During the pandemic, his I’m A Celeb predecessor Matt Hancock became the fall guy precisely because, as Health Secretary, he had been so visible in the daily briefings. As for Boris Johnson, a man whose first name is Alexander and who backed leaving the European Union for selfish, political reasons, the majority of folk first saw him on Have I Got News For You, not speaking in the Chamber as MP for Henley.
If I could go back in time, I would fire Mark Burnett before he had the idea of turning a bankrupt real estate mogul into a ferocious TV star telling people they were ‘fired’. It appals me that NBC, who aired The Apprentice for many years, pay Seth Meyers to lampoon the President’s activities, although the satire remains very watchable and astute. Shows like his, and those of Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, demand a knowledge of current events much as how rabbis need to know the Torah inside out to comment upon it.
Social media enjoys polarisation and side-taking, to ‘own’ one side or the other. In a recent development, newspaper headlines have started to comment on how a think tank report can be a ‘blow’ to the Prime Minister or Chancellor, or how ministers are ‘under pressure’ when things go awry. Hang about: isn’t this how sportswriters talk about football managers? And there we have it: politics is being turned into the Premier League. And what are Bukayo Saka, Erling Haaland and Mo Salah other than TV stars who are watched by millions of people around the world?
Again, in my lifetime, English football has become a product, with Russian, American and Saudi businessmen owning the top clubs and running them as fiefdoms. Managers have become coaches, players multimillionaires, fans customers, and to what end? This year, Manchester United fans have marched against the new ownership of Jim Ratcliffe, a tax exile who voted to leave the EU, while their rivals in the East of the city are involved in another court case. The first one threatened to eject them from European competition but, happily, they were not ejected and they won the Champions League.
In recent years, the richest and best run team has won the Premier League, usually Manchester City. Liverpool will, barring an almighty collapse, win their 20th league title and their second post-1992 championship in a competition where any of the 20 teams can beat anyone else. At this point I am duty bound to remember Leicester City’s 2016 triumph, which will be marked next year in the usual way such anniversaries are marked (cf Man United winning the 1998/99 Treble, Man City winning the Premier League in 2012); only Jamie Vardy, the team’s goalscorer, is still at the club, and he might well retire this year or next.
Vardy’s wife Becky, you recall, was subject to a court case by Coleen Rooney, famous purely for being the wife of Wayne, a great footballer who has failed in the three managerial jobs (Derby, Birmingham, Plymouth) he has had since retiring. He is back on the punditry circuit alongside his former United team-mates Rio Ferdinand, Roy Keane and Gary Neville, who are paid to criticise their ex-employers (but never their old manager, Alex Ferguson); even the commentary surrounding the Premier League is monetizable.
In politics, too, there are former ministers editing magazines (Michael Gove), hosting podcasts (Rory Stewart, George Osborne) and popping up as professional agitators (Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for seven long weeks in 2022). They write columns, accept speaking engagements and take jobs in the private sector using the knowledge they aren’t officially allowed to use for profit until two years after they leave government.
Meanwhile, the US President has become the human face of Project 2025, which is ripping up the democratic norms of a 250-year-old republic. Who could not fail to be gripped by another executive order, or a debate about capitalism, in comparison with watching Anderson Cooper present the news on CNN? What started with a group of young people on MTV’s Real World in the early 1990s has, via Big Brother, morphed into politics as reality show, with fun characters like RFK Jr and ‘Little Marco’ Rubio, who is now the US Foreign Secretary, a quite amazing piece of scriptwriting from a man who used to trade insults with TV contestants on The Apprentice.