Up Close and Personal: Popular Factual Entertainment

Abstract

A string of recent Hollywood and independently produced feature films have drawn on popular factual media trends for their plots. The Truman Show (1998), EdTV (1999), Series 7 (2000) and 15 Minutes (2001) have all mocked the voyeuristic and competitive bases of proliferating forms of factual television programming. The ironies and inversions involved in the fact that these fictional films re-create the premise of television programmes which presume to present unscripted reality point in one way to the manner in which the ‘truth’ of reality television is stranger than fiction. Series 7, a black comedy about a reality show in which contestants stalk and murder one another, might appear to take the game show format of recent reality television to an ultimate satirical conclusion, nonetheless, its premise has, sadly, been accepted in the world of ‘talk television’, a precursor of reality television. As the executive producer of the Jerry Springer talk show has said, with an apparent lack of irony, ‘There is no line to draw. If I could kill someone on television … I would execute them on television.’ (quoted in Maddox, 2000: 200).¹