Monday, May. 29, 2000

Candid Cameras

By James Poniewozik

Of all the cultural phenomena we might have borrowed from Europe--legal red-light districts, the siesta, pretty money--we get this. Sixteen men and women maroon themselves for as long as 39 days on an isolated tropical island, building driftwood huts and lunching on rats. Meanwhile, 10 folks agree to spend as long as three months sequestered, sleeping in communal bedrooms and living without TV or newspapers in a house that lacks only pencil shavings on the floor to qualify as a human hamster cage--all for cash prizes, under constant camera surveillance for a prime-time audience.

This is where a reference to The Truman Show would go--except that the movie got it wrong. It assumed that a man would have to be enslaved to live life in front of a camera. As the CBS reality series Survivor and Big Brother--adaptations of wildly successful European shows--demonstrate, people will jump at the chance. All it takes is a shot at cash and the promise of fame.

Survivor (May 31, 8 p.m. E.T.), an adaptation of a Swedish hit, drew 6,000 applications and videotapes, says executive producer Mark Burnett. The 16 chosen, ages 22 to 72, left home this spring to build an island society on Pulau Tiga, off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. With minimal supplies and few rules--no violence, no cutting down trees--they worked together to build huts, carry water from wells and find food (only rice and beans were provided; they fished and caught the rats for protein).

Except when they were working against one another. If MTV's The Real World taught us anything, it's that people are most engrossing making love or war. War's easier, so conflict was built in; castaways were selected for "strong personalities" (read: potential clashes), and they periodically voted to expel members. The last one left--picked by expelled players--wins $1 million. As for love, Burnett suspects that some contestants snuck away for a little vine swingin'. But, he says, "we were more interested in relationships in how they affected the group." Uh-huh. Judging by a preview shown to advertisers last week, the producers were after sparks and heat: the survivors are shown bickering, frolicking in bikinis and hanging their underwear on co-ed clotheslines.

Less atavistic but in its way more chilling is Dutch export Big Brother (making its debut July 6, 8 p.m. E.T.), which turns its participants into an ant farm. Stuck in an 1,800-sq.-ft. house with cameras everywhere (yes, including the bathroom), they'll be on TV five nights a week--and on the Internet 24/7. They'll also be whittled off, by an audience vote, one at a time until a winner claims $500,000.

Spy TV turns its viewers into gods. "You watch people's most intimate moments," says New York University media-ecology professor Mark Crispin Miller, "and relish the illusion of deciding life and death." But the characters are unpredictable. That's the danger. Fox had a smash with voyeuristic bridal contest Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? only to forswear future versions when the groom was found to have once been charged with assaulting a girlfriend. CBS's participants had rigorous psychological and physical screenings and background checks--said CBS-TV president Leslie Moonves after Fox's debacle: "I want grade-school diplomas"--but Survivor took a p.r. hit when an alumnus was charged with child abuse after coming home (he denies the allegation).

So why would anyone risk it--above all, conservative CBS, where the preserved head of Dick Van Dyke will be solving murders into the 22nd century? Because these programs garnered a third to half of the total audience in Europe. "You can't argue with that kind of success," says Moonves, who hopes they'll hit big in summer, as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire did.

And the series let older-skewing CBS woo youngsters, introduced to voyeur shows by The Real World in 1992 (Season 9, in New Orleans, airs this summer). "We're seeing Real World copied, but we're not getting any royalties," jokes co-creator Jonathan Murray of Bunim/Murray Productions, which is currently developing reality programs for ABC. In one, the network plans to create an online magazine and "cast" journalists both to write for the magazine and to star in the show.

The first ABC-Bunim/Murray series, Making the Band, which created, then chronicled the life of a boy band, did dismally and was pulled. (It returns for a summer run Friday.) But Survivor or Big Brother could be on the schedule next season should either catch fire, Moonves says.

Critics have called the programs exploitative. In Germany lawmakers forced Big Brother to turn off the cameras for an hour a day, apparently not seeing the irony of curtailing consensual exhibitionism on a show named Big Brother. There is a puritanical streak in some of the criticisms, an assumption that wanting to peep at willing subjects is prima facie immoral. And yet the shows depend on just that attitude to succeed; they hook viewers by convincing them they're being naughty.

But it's also hard to believe some producers' claims of high-minded purpose, as when executive producer Paul Romer calls Big Brother "a mirror to society." (Last we checked, society consisted of folks allowed to leave the house.) Scoffs Burnett, comparing Survivor with Multi-Millionaire: "There is a big difference between taking 16 adventurers to an island and 50 morons lining up to get married after meeting a stranger on TV." Of course, 23 million people watched Multi-Millionaire. He'd better hope there's not that much difference.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles