TV Is Enhanced, Not Tarred, by Reality

The ennobling part of being a critic is in trying to raise the perceptions and tastes of the audience you serve, by hoisting high your own creative standards and urging that your readers come along. This is a worthy task, but a task fraught with peril--and responsibility.

I have always considered Rick Du Brow one of the best and most perceptive of the critics writing about television. However, I think he did himself and his audience a disservice when he parroted yet another version of the “Reality TV Is the Death of Creative Television” argument, this time entitled “Fall Schedules: Networks at the Crossroads” (Calendar, May 18).

Here’s the problem. Du Brow seems to confuse form and content. Just because some reality shows are cheap, exploitive non-creative landfill, therefore, all reality shows herald the downfall of Western civilization and prime-time television, not necessarily in that order. And that’s just not true.

I have worked in this “new” genre for 10 years now as a director, writer and producer. Though in some eyes that probably makes me part of the problem and not the solution, it does allow me to speak from firsthand experience on how some of these programs are put together.

The majority of my colleagues working in this genre were schooled in documentaries. They’d much rather watch “The Thin Blue Line” than read the Weekly World News. Many of these people are excited to be exploring a different kind of television, with rules yet unwritten, addressing questions that, contrary to critical belief, are constantly asked.

How can we compress in 10 minutes a complex story that a TV movie would take two hours to explore and still remain accurate to the material? How can we make a compelling drama out of a taped interview with a real person, without losing the narrative drive of the story? How best can we walk the line between advocacy and neutrality when we present stories with obvious--and vocal--good guys and bad guys?

Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. But more often than not, committed men and women are doing the best work they can, trying to define a new way to tell a dramatic story.

To have such programs as “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Rescue 911” tarred with the same critical brush as “Hard Copy” and “Inside Edition” is ludicrous. When you mix apples and oranges, you don’t always get fruit salad. Should “Knots Landing” and “Twin Peaks” be lumped together and castigated equally because both are “adult dramas”?

I know that in the eyes of the average critic, the mass popularity of a show means that it must be doing something wrong, but in this case, the popularity of the best of the reality genre just might suggest that the viewing audience is tired of the formulaic nature of the majority of “adult dramas.”

I’m all for network television expanding its creative parameters. But I also believe creativity is where you find it. You just have to know where to look.