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Flexibility helps Reality TV to counteract diminishing returns

When a Drama is tanking there's not much you can do. Not so in Reality TV, which has plenty of cards up its sleeve.

2014-09-29_1404When a Drama series is tanking, there are limited options that networks can draw upon to bring it to the attention of new viewers: “encore” episodes (they used to be called repeats), extra Publicity interviews with the cast, new timeslots, and various stunts.

But in the case of Reality TV there is more flexibility -especially for those on a short-term turnaround between shooting and airing. In the case of My Kitchen Rules, MasterChef or The Amazing Race, much of the series is already in the can.

But Big Brother always operates on a 24 hour turnaround, allowing it some room to move to massage the storylines. The series continues to cop disappointing press, largely for its ratings and lacklustre content. In part the ratings are due to the later timeslot, yet it has also not been able to hold onto its wonderful lead-in from The Block. Despite this, it is still doing business in the younger demos.

This week the show also appears to be trying to address its content and pepper it with more stunts: a “surprise” eviction will boot one housemate tonight, on top of tomorrow’s weekly evictee before its first official Intruder on Wednesday in another special episode (which appears to have some pre-recorded content). There is some speculation the Intruder is a male model, presumably to drive the romance storylines that are already dominating the season.

Big Brother is not alone in doing its best to change the state of play. A decade ago TEN’s Reality series The Hothouse was tanking badly, when much had been invested into attractive couples building a home on the Gold Coast. It threw in a working-class couple from South Australia mid-series to add conflict, which went some way to lifting figures. Sadly it could not rescue The Renovators in 2011, which had considerably more episodes in the can.

US Reality series Utopia is also facing sliding figures. The show has a cast living in a pioneering colony for 12 months, a huge investment in television terms. This week saw a new cast member join and allowed viewers to choose a third Utopian for elimination, both of which helped lift its numbers.

The Big Brother audience often takes time to get to know its sizeable cast, so it’s perplexing that Nine has pulled back on the content and is quick to add new distractions. The show is also set to move to 7:30pm when The Block ends in a fortnight.

Time will tell if it pays off, but time is also of the essence.

4 Responses

  1. I agree totally with Dayman and I said a similar thing last week. BB is now a pathetic shadow of its former self, thanks to Nine over packaging something that should first be as natural and untouched as possible. They may as well put BB on for the kids at 4pm when they come home from school. Ten presented it as the social experiment it is meant to be, warts and all. It was not full of day to day manufactured stunts. There is virtually no unscripted live content. Nanny Nine Network packages the living guts out of any real possible show. Not only is it totally fake, Nine has put a new spin on housemates being nothing more than predetermined cutouts from central casting, they’re now trained and pre-packaged performing paper puppets.

  2. I don’t think flexibility can save BB, viewers are already turning off in droves and numbers like 500 and 700 will not save a show from the chopping block on Nine. Look what happened to the Love Bus show… Second series? Don’t think so. Or perhaps the Excess Baggage ? Second series? Nup. Reality TV producers promise the earth but can’t deliver with ratings… or storytelling. BB is the perfect mix of disaster – getting Baby Boomers to cast a show and Gen Y’s who have never been trained in storytelling to produce it. Pretty sure ABC and SBS have outraged it this year.

  3. Actually David, at the risk of sounding like a know it all, ‘The Hothouse’ was in fact filmed at Bribie Island, on the Sunshine Coast not the Gold Coast… I know this because I was living in the area at the time of filming and my dad worked as a cleaner on the set. I even got an official hothouse hat and got it signed by the winners, whose kids went to my school. It was the most exciting to happen to community in ages. I watched it faithfully every night! lol

  4. The number one problem with Big Brother this year is that there is too little content life in the house.

    Those editing the daily show seem to miss out on a lot of the more subtle story lines going on. So then all of a sudden when they are developed, we as a viewer find out about it out of no where. When there clearly has been a lot of lead up.

    The end result is you are very strongly aware that you are not watching their journey and time in the house. You’re not watching an accurate portrayal of life in the house.

    Just select bits and missing out on a lot of the more interesting stuff. Sure some people only watch for silly stuff, abs and tits. However the core concept is watching the people live in this environment. We don’t get that.

    Live streams, live updates and extra content would go a large way to address this. At this stage nothing is real.

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