I was flipping through the channels on TV the other night, when I came across a promo for a new show on NBC called Love in the Wild, which appears to be what would happen if one took Survivor, removed the whole self-sufficiency aspect, and added the conceit of it being a dating show. Given the show’s title and premise, as well as the other new NBC show, It’s Worth What?, where contestants play an amateur version of Antiques Roadshow, I started to think that maybe all the fake movies and TV shows from 30 Rock were breaking the fourth wall and becoming real. So of course, I decided to sit down and watch it.
The show was exactly what it advertised itself as, and matched my expectations to the letter. While not revolutionary or overly interesting, the program is perfect mindless summer TV. But I noticed that while watching the show, I felt a strange disconnect between myself and the people on the screen than I ever have before when watching television, or at least a greater disconnect than one would usually feel watching the prerecorded spelunking of strangers in South America. It took a few minutes to figure out the exact why of the feeling, but when I realized the cause, everything clicked into place: it was lousy casting.
Usually, reality TV is cast based on how one-dimensional the participants are. the more that someone conforms to an archetype, the better their chances of making it to the small screen. There’s the classic Real World model (jock, princess, dweeb, hick, floozy, slacker, token LBGT), the Big Brother structure (as close to self-parody and caricature as possible) and the Jersey Shore subgroup (one type with several slight variations) – everyone has a role to play, and even if they don’t, the producers and editors will find a way for them to play it.
On scripted shows, viewers are drawn in because of their fascination with the characters and their lives; writers create new people out of the ether, populated by actors who whisk us away to parallel worlds where these people live their lives in 30- or 60-minute weeks. We’re given time to learn about these people to the point where we might know them better than our own friends and family. It’s not the situations and adventures that draw us in; it’s the characters’ reactions and the relationships that change within the situations and adventures that attract viewers. With unscripted “reality” programming, however, we’re asked to take three-dimensional non-actors and insert them into different storylines without the benefit of a writing crew. The people on television are playing themselves, which means that they might not always fit into the mold that post-production shapes them into.
Love in the Wild just happens to have either cast boring people or hired terrible editors.
None of them seem interesting or developed in the slightest; they’re going through the motions and following the story beats without showing their personalities or adhering to any sort of characterizations. The participants are secondary to the situations themselves; any one of them could fill the roles of the others, making them all completely interchangeable and equally irrelevant. This makes it difficult for the viewer to even care about the people involved, and by extension, watching further episodes.
If Love in the Wild is a portent of things to come for television programming, then one wonders if this means that the medium as a whole will become increasingly more passive. Already facing the threat of interactive entertainment from computers and video games, it seems as if shows like this are designed to move the viewer even further into the spectator’s seat; eventually, the programming landscape could be littered with blank, bland, robotic content that’s visually appealing but psychologically and emotionally unappealing.
Unless the show is actually a prank that went too far in the NBC boardroom. And in that case, why did they green-light Minute to Win It?
