It’s no wonder streaming services are looking increasingly sexy as vast chunks of broadcast television sink beneath a deluge of reality programming. At one point last week, three channels were slinging simultaneous reality TV soil at our innocent faces, making the mere act of turning on your box a high risk activity, like the radio would be if 75% of all music were written by Redfoo.
In the future, watching scheduled TV will probably be considered a cry for help. With the prevalence of dull repetitive reality formulas, you could be forgiven for thinking streaming services are a Gen Y protection racket: “Give us ten bucks a month, otherwise we can’t promise you’ll be able to avoid Celebrity Dog Hypnosis.” “No! Not the dogs that are made to think they’re a different breed than they actually are! Here’s my money. Now give me Better Call Saul!”
One ratings monster currently encouraging me to cough up the cold hard cash is Seven’s My Kitchen Rules which sees teams compete to win some, well, cold hard cash, for cooking an ordinary three-course meal. It’s not awful, by any means, but nor is it the opposite. It actually feels like it might have been a rather relaxing, enjoyable sort of show if they hadn’t tried to make it into a dramatic race against life and death.
There’s the obligatory trip to the shops, captured with frenetic jumpy camera work to make it seem like buying a lobster is something only Bear Grylls could possibly hope to pull off. Running across a dangerous car park, a newlywed couple somehow manage to get inside before all the lobsters have broken free, slain their captors, and legged it back to the ocean. Even answering the doorbell to let in judges Pete and Manu is given all the dramatic import of a one-way mission to Mars.
When My Kitchen Rules focuses on the cooking, things get better, and fortunately the feedback from Pete and Manu isn’t peppered with too many of those annoying reality TV pauses. In fact, I feel like the two judges have been given the wrong platform: they’re chilled, calming, rather pleasant, and I can easily imagine them being a rather good watch on their own shows (as Manu once was, I seem to recall).
Plonked in among the rest of a show that’s obsessed with forcing Everest-scaling levels of drama out of purchasing dried scallops, or cutting a cheesecake, and #Mete (Manu and Pete: that’s right, I’ve given them a hashtag) seem as out of place as if Big Brother were presented by the Dalai Lama. This is comfort food ruined by its attempts to be something spicier – a good piece of cheese on toast buried underneath five kilos of chilli paste.
Quantity equals quality?
I only noticed it last week, but ABC’s Q&A has chosen to make a “tweetometer” part of the show. I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to signal to all of humanity: that the program is better the more “Abbottoir” puns people are tossing into the void?
It’s an odd measure of success. At one point Tony Jones and friends were clocking in at 650 tpm (that’s “tweets per minute”to you – the worst measurement system in human history). This is telegraphing the fact that, over the course of the 60-minute episode, people stopped to write something witty on their iBlurt 50,000 times rather than listening to the panel the ABC had actually bothered to invite.
Even the opening credits have Twitter birds hovering over the audience as if, simply by watching Q&A, we’ve all agreed to join some ornithological cult. I hope Gogglebox has bothered to screen out Twitter users from its cast, otherwise we’ll just end up watching a row of people on a sofa gawping at their phones. There’s another incentive to move to a streaming service: if we’re not all watching television at the same scheduled time, we might just be able to enjoy TV programs passively again.
