The domination of reality television — by Timothy Jong
Read award-winning writer Tim’s next installment (for the moment) about reality television.
Award-winning writer and Yooralla customer Timothy Jong is continuing to develop his writing skills, edging closer to his National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) goal of becoming a professional writer.
Timothy has been supported by staff at the St Albans Community Hub for many years to gain practical writing experience, preparing articles for the Hub’s quarterly newsletter.
We are very lucky to have had Tim share a number of his published works with us, which we have shared previously, including:
You can read Tim’s next installment (for the moment) about reality television below.
The domination of reality television
After the success 'Hey Hey It’s Saturday' had, spanning twenty-eight years on television, the Nine Network wanted to kick the new millennium off with a new live program with some of the elements which made the old school variety shows so successful, without being an expensive TV show to produce.
For the first year, the new chat show ‘Rove’ with Rove McManus wasn’t successful and Nine axed the show. The next year, Network 10 rebooted and reworked the program with a few changes to the format to make it a hit, where it stayed on air for the next ten years
The reboot of Rove McManus’ chat show on Channel 10 had comedic skits, interviews, musical performances and games. This format was successful for the old-school variety shows, without a large production cost. In 2010 Rove tried to revive the old variety format on Saturday nights, but the latest attempt declined in TV ratings each week.
As far as I can remember, renovating shows like 'The Block' was just airing TV on Sundays to air the ‘Room Reveals’ episode each week. The program used to be on once a week to show each room in the apartment or the run-down house that the contestants have finished.
These ‘Room Reveals’ episodes were a success for Channel Nine, Nine decided they would show 'The Block' multiple nights per week, as they were just airing reruns of 'The Big Bang Theory' weeknights at 7pm. Stripping the renovation program across multiple nights proved a success. Channel Seven and 10 noticed this change of television viewing from audiences, producing their own reality programs.
Then we see all these reality formats flooding and dominating commercial television, as reality TV was and still is a hit with viewers to this day. One of the shows were 'Australian Idol', a singing contest. The final of each series of Idol were a live event and were a must-see program for the week hitting two million viewers.
These days, we are just seeing remakes or copies of past television shows that were rating hits of renovation, cooking, dating and singing shows for rating gold at the present day. Mainly whenever an entertainment program come on commercial TV, the program mostly gets not really good viewers and it doesn’t get renewed.