2. What is the difference between each type of reality show?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LrbgtfZbMU
Spontaneous Humor Reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZKTIIwDR6g
Scripted Humor Reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3eA_7zy0kI
Show within a Show. Both Scripted and Fake
3. Main Focus
3 Reality-Inflected Series in 2005
My Life on the D-List
-Tells how Kathy Griffin struggles for fame in a straightforward non-fictional aspect.
Fat Actress
-Shows Kirstie Alley’s hardships of finding work as an obese female actor through a scripted
format.
The Comeback
-A fictional reality show within a show about Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) who tries to rebuild
and maintain her career in television.
4. TV in 2005
Renewed interest in
unscripted/inexpensive reality television
formats.
Traditional sitcoms were dying out.
This new comedy-reality hybrid was
almost like a documentary, relying on
improvisation and these particular
comedians/actresses and their
shortcomings/falling off the radar.
5. My Life on the D-List
Only show out of the 3 that is a “straight
up” reality program.
Typical episode might show her “bombing
one of her shows” or getting snubbed by
other, more successful celebrities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVXQ9GgIe1s
6. My Life on the D-List (cont)
Doesn’t use sterotypical strategies of
presenting her failures.
Her failures become commedy.
As evidence that Kathy is a D-List
celebrity, she once took a gig because
she might have been able to have a
photo opportunity with Warren Beatty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHVlA0PNKgc
7. Fat Actress
Shows the struggles of the actress who was once
a physical ideal for women in Hollywood and is
now obeece.
In her show she struggles to find work because
of her weight.
She is always stuffing her face, crying,
screaming, and complainging about her problem
which is viewed as commedy.
Her anger is what makes the show funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iylFrk_w8Z8
8. The Comeback
A show within a show.
Fictional reality about Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) who tries to
rebuild and mantain her career in television.
Very ambivalent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6eZPkFehDk
9. All 3 Shows
Reality-based comedy situation comedies
All females who have foregrounded their perceived
shortcomings for their audiences’ pleasure.
In many ways the 3 echo earlier televisual attempts to
use comedy as a space in which to perform women’s
struggles for visibility and equality.
The “reality” creates a startling sense of urgency that
arguably highlights the stakes of the comedy in a
qualitatively different way.
10. All 3 Shows
Like all reality shows these shows “press the boundaries of
audience tolerance and pleasure” by removing the “fictional
frame; or distance between actors and audiences that more
traditional genres hold in place.
What sets them apart?
Where in network TV do these types of shows fit?
“These shows create a sense of reality that is so intimate
and humiliating, you eventually have to turn away.”
Editor's Notes
1st-improv, spontaneous humor reality 3:15*4:30 2nd scripted humor reality 3rd a show within a show…both of which are scripted and fake
Each show is about female comedian actresses. Who are hasbeens or a neverwas.
Old…Full House, Boy Meets World, Friends, Sienfeld. New The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Cameras follow her around in everyday life situations as a stand up comedian giving a first person narrative about her status as D-Life celebrity. Play at 4:30
1-It shows her actually getting booed off stage and people not knowing her she is. Play at :30 In one scene on the show, her assistant says that when she tells people she works for Kathy Griffin, the say “who is that? Or does she suck?” Warrant Beatty is the guy from bonnie and clide. She didn’t want that gig becasuse she knew the crowd would not accept her style, but took it for the photo opportunity that may have been.
1-everyone mostly knows her for cheers, after the show eneded so kind of fell off. 2-Then she gained weight and couldn’t find acting jobs.
3-The show reveals Valerie’s irritating fake demanor and her dulusions of her own importanace, which she is marginalized and treated badly for by the producers, but also tells the story of her competance and hard work to establish what fame she does have.
1-And the humor from the show comes from making people uncomfortable. 2-Kathy Griffin and how most people dislike her and she is only a “d-list celebrity, Kirstie Alley, who was on cheers and thin and then got big and couldn’t find work, and Valerie Cherish is a D list actress who was in A lister back in the early 90s. Now, she has become unemployed, married, and has a much harder time getting recognized in the Hollywood scene. 4-use of camera techniques and editings… the why and how of why they are where they are, not just the what where and when.
2-unline many celebrity reality shows like The Surreal Life and My Fair Brady, which are designed to catch them behaving badly, these programs invite the viewers to witness the “real” strugless of age, weight, and sexism in a comedic narrative. And it is for that reason why they had a relatively short running time. 3-Its hard to say according to the book. Reality womens comedy cannot attract sustained interest.
