NO BAD IDEAS IN REALITY TV
A few years ago, Vulture magazine interviewed a bunch of Hollywood execs and asked them to list the worst reality TV show ideas they’d ever been pitched. The summary included:
Extreme Biggest Loser - plus-size contestants are locked in a house with a small exit and must wait till they’re skinny enough to squeeze through it.
Monkey On Your Back - contestants take part in an Amazing Race–style competition. But instead of a person being their companion, it’s a monkey.
Female Prison Beauty Pageant – as the title suggests.
Fertility Island - couples who can’t conceive are relocated to an island famous for its fertility powers. But, to expedite things (this is TV after all), the island is staffed with doctors and fertility experts who work day and night to help the couples get pregnant.
Adoption Island - a child is offered up for adoption and childless couples compete to be its parents.
Anger Island - a dozen convicted criminals (no murderers!) are flown to an island and forced to fend for themselves while being tracked down, Running Man–style, by celebrity "manhunters.” The last convict standing at the end would get $1 million to donate to their most recent victim.
OK, it’s hard to see the next Survivor among these ideas. But are they any worse than what’s already on TV?
What separates good unscripted TV ideas from bad seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Case in point: The writers on Alan Partridge used to deliberately dream up the worst TV show concepts for Partridge to pitch to the BBC. There was Monkey Tennis. Cooking in Prison. And (the legendary) Inner City Sumo – “where we take fat people from the inner cities, put them in big nappies, and then get them to throw each other out of a circle that we draw with chalk on the ground.”
Hilariously terrible ideas, right? But are they any more hilariously terrible than Whisker Wars, I Wanna Marry Harry, or Naked and Afraid? In fact, in 2012, Gordon Ramsay made a version of Partridge’s Cooking in Prison idea called Gordon Behind Bars.
If Alan Partridge could be an ideas machine, then successful unscripted TV has nothing to do with the idea and everything to do with cast and execution. Ideas are just a bit of window dressing to make us believe we’re watching something different, when in fact, we’re watching variations on the same seven shows over and over and over.
So execs shouldn’t make fun of bad ideas. Any idea is good with the right people involved.