‘Big Brother’s’ Watchers See Everything but Privacy

Last fall, viewers in Holland got their first glimpse of “Big Brother,” a program that took nine ordinary people and sequestered them in a house, taping their every move.

Broadcast by Veronica, a Dutch commercial station, the program became an overnight phenomenon. Occupants periodically voted out of the house--a game-show feature of the program--became instant celebrities. Fan clubs sprang up. The final episode, televised Dec. 30, broke ratings records for the country, drawing more viewers than any broadcast last year except the outbreak of war in Kosovo.

While it may sound like the stuff of fiction, a cross between the films “Ed TV” and “The Truman Show,” it’s not. “Big Brother,” a title derived from the watchful presence of government in George Orwell’s novel “1984,” is coming, with the U.S. incarnation to arrive this summer on CBS.

In “Big Brother” and other shows like it headed for the U.S. airwaves, some media critics see troubling questions, as major networks career down a path transforming the lives of ordinary people--all too willing to subject themselves to such exercises in pursuit of fame and fortune--into fodder for prime-time entertainment.

Various factors have gradually brought both the television industry and society to this point. One is a video culture in which viewers seem numbed to shocking real-life images that once might have appalled them. Another is competition for the networks from dozens of new channels and the Internet, which appear increasingly willing to test boundaries in pursuit of ratings, leaving few obvious curbs on the depths to which this appetite for “reality” might lead.

“Big Brother” will feature as many as 10 strangers isolated in a house together for 100 days, with no TV, telephone or interaction with the outside world. Their actions will be documented by 24 cameras and 59 microphones. Episodes will run five nights a week; lengths are still undecided. Each episode will be culled from reams of footage filmed the day before. Additional material will be available via the Internet, and the show will include cash prizes for contestants who last longest. (The housemates and the public will share decisions on who stays and who goes.)

As a programming form, this represents a natural extension of “The Real World,” MTV’s documentary series that assembles a group of youths and chronicles their activities, and of other examples of so-called “reality” television.

Ancient Instincts Bring Audience In

Broadcasters across the globe are finding a ready audience for such voyeuristic fare, which plays to instincts as basic and as old as humanity itself--from the gladiator pits of ancient Rome to the high-speed car chases that galvanize TV viewers for hours on end today. As a bonus, these reality-entertainment shows generally cost far less to produce than conventional sitcoms and dramas--another reason the form is rapidly proliferating.

To some, such programming concepts suggest that excesses forecast in the 1976 film satire “Network” have in essence come to pass. Writer Paddy Chayefsky envisioned a world in which soothsayers, political terrorists and vigilantes are granted weekly prime-time forums and crazed anchorman Howard Beale is murdered on the air, all in the name of higher ratings.

“I suppose there’s no limit until somebody does something so offensive that they’ll stop,” said Grant Tinker, who served as chairman of NBC for six years in the 1980s, when the Big Three networks still commanded the majority of the audience and cable remained in a nascent stage.

“There’s a kind of desperation about it,” Tinker continued. “There’s so many players now, and getting noticed is so difficult, the approach seems to be you just do something bizarre and hope that it works.”

The public willingness to participate in such ventures, as evidenced by the 20,000 youths who regularly apply to take part in each edition of “The Real World,” reflects the astounding premium now placed on fame--a trend evident in the confessions willingly made by those who appear on Jerry Springer’s talk show.

“What have we become as a society that we’ll do anything we can to be cut from the herd of mediocrity?” asked Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at Cal State Los Angeles. “That’s why all these people go on the talk shows. The idea of shame or privacy, the notion of public and private--that line has been completely obliterated. . . . There is the clear realization that it doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you get celebrity for it, and then you’re a hot commodity.”

The success of “Big Brother” in the Netherlands has emboldened networks in other countries to proceed with their own localized versions.

“It worked in Germany, it works in Holland, it’s working all over Europe,” said John de Mol, producer of both the Dutch and U.S. shows, who rushed out to see “The Truman Show” when it opened in Holland while he was developing the project. He expects it to work in the United States as well.

CBS, which committed itself to broadcasting 50 hours of “Big Brother,” is planning another reality-based competition derived from a European import, “Survivor,” which employs an even more outlandish-sounding format--stranding 16 people on an island near Borneo and having them compete to see who is allowed to remain until the end.

If CBS has been especially aggressive in this arena, the network is hardly alone. At least two rival broadcasters bid for “Big Brother,” and several other cinema verite programs are coming to prime time.

ABC will introduce a series in March called “Making the Band,” described as a “real-life drama” providing viewers a glimpse into the lives of a group of young men pursuing their dreams of being musicians. Fox will air a serialized documentary this summer in which a film crew invades a high school to focus on actual teenagers.

And in what might pass as a “Saturday Night Live” spoof of ABC’s quiz show hit “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” Fox--traditionally the edgiest network in testing reality concepts--next week will feature 50 women vying to marry a wealthy man they have never met before, during a special titled “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire.”

“We’ve really hit the bottom,” said one veteran TV producer, speaking on condition of anonymity, responding to promos for the Fox special.

Programming Sets ‘Ethical Land Mines’

If certain people feel few constraints about baring all in front of the cameras, there remains the issue of what obligation networks have in exploiting that willingness.

As Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., asked, “Does technology lead us rather than common sense? I wonder, in the case of programmers, how much forethought they [engage in] on the ethical land mines in this kind of programming.”

Such debates go back at least as far as the landmark 1973 documentary “An American Family,” which chronicled the deteriorating relations of the Loud family and was widely seen as having contributed to the parents’ divorce. Since then there have been similar productions, including PBS’ “The Farmer’s Wife,” which in great detail explored the challenges facing a poor Nebraska farm family.

Still, producers cite a difference between serious documentary filmmaking--usually relegated to venues such as PBS and the art-house film circuit--and the genre now winning favor in prime time, which producer Erik Nelson has characterized as “deranged game shows” that put people in unusual settings or competitions in pursuit of prizes.

David Sutherland, who made “The Farmer’s Wife” with his wife Nancy, spent two years doing research before settling on a couple to profile, sleeping on couches and getting to know the people involved. In addition, he shied away from those who seemed to covet such exposure.

“If they were too eager to do it, I’d get uptight,” said Sutherland, now working on a portrait of teenagers in Eastern Kentucky.

In the case of “Big Brother,” the producers describe the show as “part social experiment, part real-life soap [opera] and part competition,” with occupants voted out of the house to gradually reduce the number of “players.”

The Poynter Institute’s Steele noted that the use of documentary techniques in such programs further blurs the line between entertainment and journalism, raising the issue of whether the desire to curb potential excesses in entertainment could have the unintended effect of leading to proposals for restrictions on journalists.

Characters’ Troubles Contribute to Appeal

At a news conference to announce “Big Brother,” CBS acknowledged the need for psychological testing of potential contestants and other safeguards to ensure that no one is harmed. “We’re not trying to torture anybody. We don’t want anybody to leave here and go to Bellevue,” CBS Television President Leslie Moonves said.

Yet difficulties plaguing the “characters” undoubtedly contribute to the appeal of these programs, as shown by a recent edition of “The Real World,” whose ratings soared as one young woman struggled with alcoholism. Another installment featured an HIV-positive man who died of AIDS shortly after taping concluded.

CBS fielded few questions about ethical considerations from the press regarding “Big Brother,” suggesting that the gradual slide into such areas has diluted any collective sense of outrage or alarm regarding avant-garde concepts.

At the same time, the ratings success of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and, to a lesser degree, other reality-based programs, has eroded resistance--or “snobbery,” as “Millionaire” producer Michael Davies has called it--that executives felt toward such shows, compared with sitcoms and dramas, when scheduling them in prime time.

“There’s a tremendous willingness to take chances now,” said Greg Lipstone, a senior vice president at the William Morris Agency, which put together U.S. deals for “Big Brother” and “Millionaire,” which originated in Britain. “The marketplace is open for alternative types of programming.”

It appears clear that whatever peculiar concepts programmers develop, they will have no difficulty finding people willing to participate. Academics attribute this to an erosion of the reluctance people once felt about exposing intimate details of their lives, as well as instant celebrities--from Joey Buttafuoco to Monica Lewinsky--who have illustrated the potential benefits of public recognition, even when achieved under dubious circumstances.

The question remains, however, what principles will guide the entertainment industry as it increasingly turns ordinary people into prime-time stars.

“Government and academia are controlled by ethics,” cautioned Cal State L.A.’s Fischoff. “There is nothing to control commercial entertainment. If people agree to do it, they agree.”