Temptation and Lust
The ClubHouse: Temptation Island: Temptation and Lust
Ocean_Islands | Tuesday, January 09, 2001 - 06:24 am  'Reality TV' stoops to worse temptations Lust for ratings drives Fox to lure viewers with hunks, sirens, crumbling relationships JOHN DOYLE 01/09/2001 The Globe and Mail Metro Page A1 All material copyright Thomson Canada Limited or its licensors. All rights reserved. PASADENA, CALIF. -- The Fox Television network, which last year aired the sleazy, harshly criticized special Who Wants To Marry A Multi-Millionaire,is coming under fire for another exploitative TV show. This time it's not a parade of eager young women being offered to a millionaire. It's a baker's dozen of tempting young singles being offered to the partners in four long-term relationships, on a tropical island. Viewers of Temptation Island, which starts tomorrow in prime time, are being asked to be voyeurs, watching the psychological trauma of people seeing their partners gambol and go on dates with potential new love interests specifically chosen to lure them into infidelity. Some call it reality TV and some call it unscripted soap opera. Whatever it's called, the new form of television is getting steamier and the U.S. networks are lusting after the sort of viewer numbers that Survivor brought CBS last summer. Fox, a network that also has a history of airing specials called When Animals Attack and The World's Scariest Police Chases, backed away from the genre after the disastrous Who Wants To Marry A Multi-Millonaire. Now it's pre-empting the publicity for Survivor II: The Australian Outback, by offering a salacious twist on the Survivor concept. You can imagine the pitch: "It's Survivor meets Blind Date ! We put these four couples on a tropical island to test their fidelity and commitment. We'll call it Temptation Island. We provide a bunch of tempting women to entice the men. We offer a gang of hunky young men to seduce the women." The pitch might conclude: "The viewers watch to see if the couples crumble." No network executive could resist it. Sex, sea, sand and the possibility of heartbreak? Sounds irresistible. Months later, the network executive is starting to feel uncomfortable when the questions start coming. Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Television Entertainment Group, looks both grief-stricken and annoyed at the situation he's in. The network acknowledges that it has tested the contestants for HIV -- even though Mr. Grushow says "this is not a show, as you will see, that is about sex. This is a show that is exploring the dynamics of serious relationships." A TV critic asks him, with acidic seriousness, "Has there been another show in network history where the contestants had to be screened for sexually transmitted diseases?" Mr. Grushow gets on his high horse: "I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know what other networks are doing. I don't know what was done for Survivor. I don't know what was done for Big Brother. I don't know what was done for The Mole or any number of other non-scripted shows that are coming down the pike." Temptation Island has caused a sensation here at the Television Critics Association midseason press tour. The Fox network, which last year aired the disastrous Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, is now unleashing a desert-island show that makes Survivor look cerebral. First the network scheduled a news conference for the series, which airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m., and then cancelled the conference. Critics grew suspicious. Only after persistent questioning was the first episode shown to us. Even knowing, cynical critics were astonished by the crassness of the latest phase in reality TV. The show is certainly an assault on the frontier of taste. It isn't Survivor crossed with Blind Date. It's Survivor created by sadists. What viewers will see, beginning tomorrow night, is four unmarried couples being taken to an island to test and explore the strength of their relationships. The couples are soon separated from their partners and sent to opposite ends of the island. The men live in a resort with 13 single women, and the four women from the couples live in another resort with 13 single men who are there to entertain, date and possibly seduce them. At first, the four couples, all in their 20s or 30s, seem unfazed by the undertaking. Twentysomething Shannon says: "This will give Andy a kick in the butt. In other words, it's time to get serious or get out." Andy has nothing to say about that. "I told my buddies this is just like the Pepsi Challenge, but having ladies instead of soft drinks to choose." Another couple admit that the male partner has already strayed once and that Temptation Island is the opportunity to see whether he's capable of doing it again. Everything is loaded for the possibility of romance-wrecking. Before the couples arrived at the island they were interviewed individually about their tastes in the opposite sex and their fears about their partners. The groups of single young men and women hired to tempt the couples apart were specifically chosen to be as enticing as possible to the participants. In an act of spectacular crassness, the sirens to tempt the men and the young hunks to entice the women are paraded before them. The men then get to choose the guy they think is the most dangerous and vote him off the island. The women also pick an alluring woman and vote her off. The men are cocky when they see the competition. "They look like punks just off the street," one of them says and the other three men agree. The guy they pick for banishment is a sculpted youngster who has announced that he's a hip-hop music fan by doing some fancy dance moves. "Chicks are suckers for good dancers," one man announces, speaking for the group. The women are amused that the men didn't single out an easygoing professional masseur for banishment. When the women choose the temptress they want off the island, the levity disappears. They glare at the parade of young women in bikinis. As a group, they decide that one young woman "with attitude" should go. The banished woman also has her hair in several colours and, apparently, was already staring at one of the men. Then the groups separate. The men flirt with abandon, clearly enjoying the attention of the young women who have been hired to pry them away from their girlfriends. At the other end of the island, the women are much more wary of the hunks trying to entertain them. It's obvious they're distracted by worries about what their boyfriends are getting up to. In a ritual that evolves in the second episode, the two groups are allowed to see videotape of their partners on a date with another person. In the clip of the ritual shown to critics here, the fear and anger is real and heartbreaking. The Fox network is making no apologies for this sensationally crude and cruel series. In fact, Fox's Mr. Grushow seemed annoyed that, after Fox was hammered for Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, other networks got a free ride in the reality-TV craze. "This TV season began with us cancelling a repeat of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, which undoubtedly would have been hugely rated. We then sat back and watched the other three networks take full advantage of the story under the protective veil of news, newsmagazines and talk shows." The eight episodes of Temptation Island will climax during the February sweeps period, when the networks use ratings figures to set the advertising fees they charge. At that point, at least a few on Temptation Island will be in tears and Fox will be laughing all the way to the bank. (no i did not write this article--O.) |
Ocean_Islands | Thursday, January 11, 2001 - 03:53 am  It will be interesting to see the climax of this show! >snark< (whoever wrote this article hasn't been in the dating scene recently) |
Ocean_Islands | Thursday, January 11, 2001 - 07:54 am  Reality Bites, But on TV It's Always Attractive By JULIE SALAMON 01/11/2001 The New York Times Page 1, Column 5 c. 2001 New York Times Company If this is reality, where are all the ugly people? Not on ''Temptation Island,'' the new Fox show that began last night about four ''committed'' couples who test their love by separately subjecting themselves to the wiles of seducers and seductresses -- on a tropical island, of course. Not on ''The Mole,'' the tedious, complicated ABC game show that sends a group of harried contestants on various adventures (jumping out of an airplane on the first episode) while they try to uncover the saboteur among them. Not on ''Survivor II,'' to begin on Super Bowl Sunday, Jan. 28, whose castaways are more uniformly good-looking than their predecessors. This is pseudo-reality, the second wave, courtesy of ''Survivor.'' A major hit like that almost always spells trouble for viewers, who are doomed to knockoffs, usually second-rate. Since hype is part of the reality package, these gimmicky shows have also arrived with much publicity, including segments this week on NBC's ''Dateline'' and CBS's ''60 Minutes II'' and articles in numerous newspapers, including this one, and a fresh crop of pronouncements: It's the end of fictional storytelling! It's the end of taste! Sound familiar? It should. The alarms were sounded last spring, when everyone thought the voyeuristic ''Big Brother'' on CBS was going to be a huge hit, lusciously controversial, offering the lure of Peeping Tom-ism right in prime time. The death knell of privacy, it was said. As it turned out, the only thing that died was ''Big Brother.'' Peeping at dull people didn't make them exciting, and the loss of fake privacy wasn't any loss at all. ''Big Brother'' was a bore and it flopped. ''Survivor'' was jump-started by the same publicity jolt, but became a phenomenon for the reasons television shows usually succeed (and the same reasons that most of the copycat programs won't). The show was shrewdly produced, edited and scored to create tension and develop individual characters. The casting proved to be a mixture of ingenuity and luck as the contestants turned improvisational roles into a biting ensemble drama and as conquering nature took a back seat to conquering one another. But the real stroke of luck was the emergence of an unexpected star, the flamboyantly devious Richard Hatch, who became the show's centerpiece. Still, no one really knows why any television show catches fire (otherwise every network would have its own ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire''). So the copycats seize on the latest successful gimmicks and hope for magic. That's why it's dangerous to extract broad sociological conclusions from the success of a couple of television shows from a particular genre (especially when you're ignoring the failure of other, similar enterprises). Remember that in the revolutionary rock 'n' roll 1960's three very popular and long-running television shows were about hillbillies. ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' was the No. 1 program on television in its first two seasons and lasted from 1962 to 1971. ''Petticoat Junction'' (about the farming community of Hooterville) and ''Green Acres'' (about a wealthy Manhattan lawyer who relocates to a farm outside Hooterville) did very well, too. In its prime ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' attracted as many as 60 million viewers in one week (compared with the 50 million people who tuned into the final episode of ''Survivor.''). The numbers for ''Survivor'' were smaller but more remarkable because the television landscape has changed so much since Jed Clampett struck oil and moved to Beverly (Hills, that is). There were three networks then. Now there are twice as many networks and endless cable channels. Producers need smaller numbers to succeed, but they face a far broader range of competition, including television's own past, which plays continuously (including reruns of ''The Beverly Hillbillies''). While outlets have proliferated, original ideas remain scarce, so producers desperately clone and reconfigure what succeeded last. ''Temptation Island'' openly follows the ''Survivor'' model, using crisp editing, a provocative musical score, video diaries (which allow participants to offer their thoughts directly to the audience) and a clean-cut host. But its heart seems to be with ''The Real World,'' the long-running MTV show that puts a group of young strangers together while cameras record what develops. Unlike the original ''Survivor,'' which covered all its demographic bases, including a range of ages and body types, ''Temptation Island'' has focused on the buff and the beautiful. The couples and the predators are in their 20's and they all look great, regardless of occupation. (A female physician has been a Playboy model.) The hardship, if there will be any, is all emotional. No rat-eating, no latrine-building, no contests of physical endurance (unless sex counts, and there wasn't any in the first episode, though there was much giggling about it). The contestants spent only two weeks on their island off the coast of Belize. They were greeted with hors d'oeuvres and drinks with fruit in them, and slept in comfortable quarters. It looks like an ad for a Marriott resort. On last night's premiere, the couples learned the rules and then met the potential predators who introduced themselves at the pool and then lined up like beauty contestants. Later the four attached men went to live on one end of the island among the 13 single women; the four attached women lived among the single men. So far, there's been more soul-searching (ankle-deep) than salaciousness. On Tuesday, Fox reported that one couple, Taheed and Ytossie, who are unmarried, were eliminated from the game in the third episode when they disclosed that they had a child together, which was against the rules. Reality has been a staple of cable for years, perhaps beginning with public-access stations, then the Weather Channel, then the development of the Food Network, the History Channel and Court TV. With ''The Real World'' and ''Road Rules,'' MTV created the notion of staged psychological experiments, placing real people in artificial circumstances. Then ''Survivor'' and ''Big Brother'' added game show elements to the mix. The participants were actually contestants, adjusting their behavior to stay in the game and win the prize -- which helped inform ''Survivor's'' gripping spectacle of scheming and manipulation. But like drama, this type of pseudo-reality depends on clarity of vision. Murkiness blanketed Tuesday's premiere of ABC's ''Mole.'' Cheesy to the core, this game show failed on almost every count. The editing was dull, the rules were confusing, the emotions felt manufactured. In one episode, the group is shuttled from the Mojave Desert to Paris and to the South of France, but the visual excitement is so minimal they could just as well have stayed on a sound stage. The eviction of the first contestant, who had been with the group only a couple of days, provoked a round of unconvincing wailing. Sorriest of all was the spectacle of Anderson Cooper, a once promising broadcast journalist, presiding as master of these witless ceremonies. Far more fascinating than any of the American shows is ''Castaway'' (not to be confused with the Tom Hanks movie ''Cast Away''). It is a British import, which can now be seen in the 15 million homes in the United States that receive the cable channel BBC America. On Jan. 1, 2000, months before ''Survivor'' appeared on American television, 36 men, women and children settled on Taransay, off the western coast of Scotland. They planned to spend a year on this nontropical, blustery island, the only prize being the experience itself. Like the BBC's fine series ''1900 House,'' which followed the misadventures of a family that agreed to live as the Victorians did for three months, ''Castaway'' combined elements of drama, documentary and sociology. The contestants were not there to win $1 million, but to form a community. Some of these survivors even carried a few extra pounds and had bad teeth. Not much time passed before utopianism crumbled. Faced with a fierce winter, sickness, food shortages and a variety of personalities, fighting and scheming broke out. An important lesson emerged: uniform goals and the absence of prize money did not reduce whining, manipulating and tension. People began breaking the rules, sneaking off the island to shop for fresh vegetables and importing whiskey and cigarettes. A gay man insulted a woman's cooking and she lashed out with a homophobic tirade. A religious man told the video diary that his misery on the island must have a purpose, perhaps to convert someone to Jesus. A water emergency caused a real emergency for these Brits: afternoon tea was banned. A shaggy university professor scorned the family men for refusing to bring their children until they had a roof over their heads. A dog died. Over the course of the year, people left the island and celebrities were created as the programs were shown in Britain. Tabloid reporters and photographers flew in by helicopter; a band even showed up as part of a publicity stunt. All of this was incorporated into the drama. And surprisingly dramatic it is. Though there would be no ''Castaway'' community without television, the emotions that emerge from these adventurers feel authentic. When they confide to the video camera, they speak of feeling trapped by their surroundings, especially the other humans. But they also express a sense of genuine appreciation for the spare beauty of the rugged landscape. On this series, artificiality forces humanity to emerge, with pettiness and, occasionally, with poetry. The prevailing spirit of the new reality shows, however, is cheap and sleazy. Maybe it will be fun to watch a woman chained to a group of young men, her slaves, on ''Chains of Love.'' Maybe not. But this too may pass. It's been a long time since anyone made a new show about hillbillies. |
Guruchaz | Thursday, January 11, 2001 - 08:01 am  Cool! Look at how much the media hates these shows yet they just keep thriving! You know they love it because it gives them something else to b1tch about. |
Resortgirl | Thursday, January 11, 2001 - 08:25 am  In its prime ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' attracted as many as 60 million viewers in one week (compared with the 50 million people who tuned into the final episode of ''Survivor.''). Not a fair comparison... there were only 4 stations in the 60's versus 100's now.... |
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