When Charles Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, he wasn't just mapping out the story of human evolution. Paddling about in the remote waters of the Galapagos, he was also setting the stage for the latest development in network television.
With Darwinian ruthlessness, TV has hit on survival-of-the-fittest contests as the latest way to drum up ratings from audiences who have walked away from schedules filled with the same old sitcoms. Engaged in its own life-or-death evolutionary struggle with cable TV and the Internet, mainstream TV is developing nasty new series where competitors can win big prizes by inflicting pain and humiliation while the cameras roll.
CBS has set the tone for the next generation of heartless game shows with its summer 2000 series Survivor: Sixteen people will be stranded on a jungle island for six weeks and forced to live off their wits. But foraging for food and shelter is just the starting point of this series. The real key to audience interest, CBS believes, is the rule that the contestants must expel one or more of their group each week until only two survivors remain. The 14 ostracized players will then decide on the winner. People who study television claim this is just TV's belated way of abandoning its feel-good principles to appeal to viewers' darker side.
But the human cost of TV's escapist adventuring was demonstrated with the original Swedish version of Survivor, where the first person exiled from the island committed suicide a month later. CBS maintains it will only enlist competitors who are psychologically prepared -- presumably people who are used to being rejected on national TV when they're not dodging poisonous snakes.
This antisocial Darwinism will also rule in another vérité series that CBS is expected to pick up for the summer, a knock-off of a hugely popular Dutch series called Big Brother. Confinement is the key to this show as well. A group of young people are shut up in a specially constructed house filled with cameras and microphones that monitor their every move. Once again, the question of who gets to stay and who has to leave is based on a popularity contest. The housemates vote for their favourites and turf out those who can't conform to the group ethos.
Think of it as blackball TV, with all the petty cruelties and warped values of fraternity pledge week turned into prime-time entertainment. What was presented as dark comedy in such satirical films as The Truman Show and EDtv is quickly becoming the norm in the anything-for-a-buck TV business. On MTV's Real World and Road Rules, young people are thrown together in a house or a van and asked to critique each other as claustrophobia starts to breed tension. In MuchMusic's VJ Search 2000, making fun of the hopefuls who long to be a hip TV host is an essential part of the process.
Though such shows seem to have a special appeal to the more cold-blooded members of the Internet generation, who are accustomed to having all their culture interactive, the in-your-face formula is being applied more widely. Look at the quiz shows that quickly developed from the instantly popular Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. Fox produced Greed, in which the team captain was able to accumulate more money by getting rid of weaker teammates, all of whom have been preselected by the network as the kind of people audiences could identify with.
Thinking along the same lines, NBC came up with Twenty One, where the studio audience chooses and rejects competitors based on nothing more than smile and age and skin colour. The modern breed of quiz shows has been accused of dumbing down the intellectual level to help the viewers play along. But with that dumbness has come a play-along meanness that's even more disheartening.
Oddly enough, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, the show that started the latest stampede to more lifelike reality programming, is the exact opposite of such mean-spirited shows.
Reacting against traditional 1950s quiz shows where competitors were turned into fierce antagonists, Millionaire is completely benign and co-operative. Eager host Regis Philbin urges on his players and shows real sadness when they lose. Audience members can pitch in to help contestants, friends at home are waiting by their phone to help with an answer if needed and -- a key to the show's success -- the camera frequently pans the crowd to find the contestant's spouse or partner, looking nervous and hopeful.
Best of all, the Millionaire contestants look much like the rest of us, normal people who would probably get voted off an island by the people who like to think life is a popularity contest.
FINE TUNING
Friends. It's Sweeps time, and the first of the guest stars on the scene is Reese Witherspoon, who turns up here as Rachel's conniving little sister. (NBC/Global, 8 p.m.) ER. With Kellie Martin on her way out as ER's medical student, Maura Tierney (NewsRadio) arrives to bring new life to the joe jobs. (NBC/CTV, 10 p.m.)
Talk Shows
Open Mike with Mike Bullard. Kreskin, Michee Mee. ( Comedy Network at 10 p.m., CTV at 12:05 a.m.) Jay Leno. Courteney Cox Arquette, Tina Turner, Brady Barr. ( NBC at 11:35 p.m.) Bill Maher. Terry Farrell, Steve (Sting) Borden. ( ABC at 12:05 a.m.)