Nick Hitchon was a professor of mine in college. He seemed like a genuinely very nice guy and took the time to learn everyone's name, despite how large the classes were.
7up is truly one of the most astonishing and ambitious pieces of television ever made. When I found it, I couldn't stop watching it and I learned a ton from it. Highly recommended!
Its reach exceeds its grasp, but what a concept to reach for. Truly distilling seven years of a life into a single couple‐hour documentary is obviously impossible, let alone seven years of fourteen lives, yet in trying it gets partway there, and later episodes get even more interesting by acknowledging the limitations. A phenomenal series.
I don’t think it’s trying to distill life in the way you say. It’s the opposite. It’s impossibly thin slices of lives, the length of a conversation at a bus stop, which accrete meaning over the episodes.
You are constantly reminded of what you only know because of earlier episodes, and how much goes unsaid.
It’s something only empathy can make sense of and it challenges the viewer to empathize across time and culture.
The class resonances mean it’s a different experience when watched as a British person too.
"Reality TV" as it is now was born from a writer's strike. Producers couldn't outright give the people scripts and written lines, but they could stand off camera and feed them lines off the cuff in the style of leading questions. If anyone thinks these shows are not intentionally pushed in the directions the producers want, then they just are not paying attention. Which is precisely what these producers want
In my headcanon it was all born from an experimental show (Big Brother) in around 2000 - which was obviously and intentionally stage managed but otherwise largely genuine behaviours. It took them a couple of seasons to really optimise for the "right" contestants and how to maximise the drama etc etc.
The move to more and more of reality tv content is as much about budgets as anything else imo
MTV's The Real World began in 1992. Did it inolve a writers' strike?
Edit: Looking at Wikipedia's account, there are many reality TV shows going back decades before that. Some are game shows and other things - t's hard to tell what matches the modern model.
I know many people who watch, I watch myself, and we all know it's semi scripted and that the overall arcs are decided in advance. The really interesting thing about reality tv is once you realise that this is happening, the "Reality" part really comes back into play even stronger because you can see how people react in such situations (the situation being them being part of a scripted reality tv show while wanting to increase their social media following etc). These days there's also the whole component of social media posts and real life events between the seasons that sometimes are more juicy than the show itself, but only get exposed because of the show.
It's just that most people who don't watch, or like to feel smarter than those who watch, think that you just sit there and suspend all belief instead of seeing it for what it is and acknowledging it's pretty interesting.
I don't think it's a matter of "feeling smarter" (at least not for me); I don't like most reality TV because the things you mention just don't resonate with me as being interesting or worth watching. I don't particularly care how a bunch of "regular people"[0] react in the situation of being fed scripts while wanting to increase their social media following. I don't care about random people I don't know and their "juicy" events. Some people do, and that's fine; it just isn't my cup of tea.
My partner got me into The Challenge early in our relationship. There's a lot about it that I don't like, and it's pretty clear that the competition itself is steered by the production team in ways that aren't really natural, and the outcome week to week is often likely not what would happen if the cast members weren't interfered with. I'm not on social media and don't care what the cast is up to off-screen, and I never watch the "reunion" episode at the end of each season because it's just a bunch of big-personality drama and performances made for internet points. But the show itself can be fun to watch sometimes, and some of the challenges they have to complete are genuinely difficult and cool to watch.
[0] The "regular people" thing is also really blurry. Sure, most (all?) reality shows pull from people who aren't otherwise actors or famous, but being on a long-running reality TV show can create that fame and lead to other (no-reality-TV) acting gigs. (Arguably many of the long-time cast members of The Challenge are celebrities in their own right, with curated public presences, and some of them have since taken on regular non-reality acting roles.)
I don’t see how that differs from any other fiction. Either the whole thing is non fiction, or it’s fictional.
I would even go so far as to label only videos of an event itself, like security recordings, to be non fiction as re-enactments and whatnot can have a lot of extra information that was not there in real life.
It would be very difficult for any TV show or film to meet this bar for non-fiction, because even if the footage is real there's still an edit.
The Senna documentary[1] is in the grey area. It's entirely composed of archival footage - no reconstructions, no talking heads, no voiceover. But the filmmaker has still chosen which footage to include and omit and in what order to construct a narrative. I don't think that neatly falls into fiction or non-fiction in your model.
I don't think that follows. It's fine to recognize that something that isn't non-fiction is fiction, and, frankly, that's the only reasonable thing to do, since you can't know what's true and what isn't. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it just as much as the next person, or get something good out of it.
What am I missing out on if I cannot tell what is and is not fiction? It seems detrimental to assume something is real and then it turns out to be fake (but I will never know).
I'm not sure if anything I say will convey the point because I think you already got what I meant, but think of Santa. During childhood it goes from reality to the middleground of "I wonder if" to later clearly being fiction. Not knowing what is what and later finding out or not is interesting in itself.
I have followed the Up Series for decades, although fewer than six, and I am truly sorrowful at its end. When I was young they felt so far away from me and as I've gotten older I felt as though I have been catching up.
Everybody I've ever recommended the "7 Up" series to has thanked me. I rewatch them all, every few years – my first viewing was right before my own 21st birthday (decades ago).
Why is that surprising? In 1961, the UK was 98.5% British White. By 1971, it was still 97% British White. That fourteen people of that time period would be British White isn't unlikely.
He was a compulsive liar (judging from the rest of the wikipedia page), and one of the lies was that he was one of the kids interviewed. It was a lie that was easily disproven because we all can watch those videos.
It is also explained in the link fortran77 posted that got flagged to death.
A genuinely interesting article. I'd like to know more about how their lives changed throughout the years...
...although there is no reason to want to know that. They are regular people like the neighbor and the mailmen. Gosh, the things TV make us want to do!
The Up series is genuinely interesting though and previous installments directed by the late Michael Apted were critically acclaimed. The fact that these people are normal British people (from various socioeconomic classes) is the point -- you can look at them at different ages and see how the intersection of personality, ability, and class affected their development.
No, they came from a range of schools. In fact, the premise of the first documentary, before it became a series, was that where children end up in life can be predicted from the social class they started in. But the series outgrew that simplistic idea very quickly.
Nick Hitchon was a professor of mine in college. He seemed like a genuinely very nice guy and took the time to learn everyone's name, despite how large the classes were.
7up is truly one of the most astonishing and ambitious pieces of television ever made. When I found it, I couldn't stop watching it and I learned a ton from it. Highly recommended!
Its reach exceeds its grasp, but what a concept to reach for. Truly distilling seven years of a life into a single couple‐hour documentary is obviously impossible, let alone seven years of fourteen lives, yet in trying it gets partway there, and later episodes get even more interesting by acknowledging the limitations. A phenomenal series.
I don’t think it’s trying to distill life in the way you say. It’s the opposite. It’s impossibly thin slices of lives, the length of a conversation at a bus stop, which accrete meaning over the episodes.
You are constantly reminded of what you only know because of earlier episodes, and how much goes unsaid.
It’s something only empathy can make sense of and it challenges the viewer to empathize across time and culture.
The class resonances mean it’s a different experience when watched as a British person too.
This is what I thought "Reality TV" should have been. Genuinely interesting content about real people in the real world.
Somehow they managed to just create soap opera with bad actors instead.
"Reality TV" as it is now was born from a writer's strike. Producers couldn't outright give the people scripts and written lines, but they could stand off camera and feed them lines off the cuff in the style of leading questions. If anyone thinks these shows are not intentionally pushed in the directions the producers want, then they just are not paying attention. Which is precisely what these producers want
In my headcanon it was all born from an experimental show (Big Brother) in around 2000 - which was obviously and intentionally stage managed but otherwise largely genuine behaviours. It took them a couple of seasons to really optimise for the "right" contestants and how to maximise the drama etc etc.
The move to more and more of reality tv content is as much about budgets as anything else imo
yeah, I'd agree with that, but the number of shows just exploded after the strike taking them from MTV to mainstream channels.
it's all editing. In an entire week of cameras, you can always find a bit of time where anyone behaves in an outrageous over the top manner
MTV's The Real World began in 1992. Did it inolve a writers' strike?
Edit: Looking at Wikipedia's account, there are many reality TV shows going back decades before that. Some are game shows and other things - t's hard to tell what matches the modern model.
I know many people who watch, I watch myself, and we all know it's semi scripted and that the overall arcs are decided in advance. The really interesting thing about reality tv is once you realise that this is happening, the "Reality" part really comes back into play even stronger because you can see how people react in such situations (the situation being them being part of a scripted reality tv show while wanting to increase their social media following etc). These days there's also the whole component of social media posts and real life events between the seasons that sometimes are more juicy than the show itself, but only get exposed because of the show.
It's just that most people who don't watch, or like to feel smarter than those who watch, think that you just sit there and suspend all belief instead of seeing it for what it is and acknowledging it's pretty interesting.
I don't think it's a matter of "feeling smarter" (at least not for me); I don't like most reality TV because the things you mention just don't resonate with me as being interesting or worth watching. I don't particularly care how a bunch of "regular people"[0] react in the situation of being fed scripts while wanting to increase their social media following. I don't care about random people I don't know and their "juicy" events. Some people do, and that's fine; it just isn't my cup of tea.
My partner got me into The Challenge early in our relationship. There's a lot about it that I don't like, and it's pretty clear that the competition itself is steered by the production team in ways that aren't really natural, and the outcome week to week is often likely not what would happen if the cast members weren't interfered with. I'm not on social media and don't care what the cast is up to off-screen, and I never watch the "reunion" episode at the end of each season because it's just a bunch of big-personality drama and performances made for internet points. But the show itself can be fun to watch sometimes, and some of the challenges they have to complete are genuinely difficult and cool to watch.
[0] The "regular people" thing is also really blurry. Sure, most (all?) reality shows pull from people who aren't otherwise actors or famous, but being on a long-running reality TV show can create that fame and lead to other (no-reality-TV) acting gigs. (Arguably many of the long-time cast members of The Challenge are celebrities in their own right, with curated public presences, and some of them have since taken on regular non-reality acting roles.)
I don’t see how that differs from any other fiction. Either the whole thing is non fiction, or it’s fictional.
I would even go so far as to label only videos of an event itself, like security recordings, to be non fiction as re-enactments and whatnot can have a lot of extra information that was not there in real life.
It would be very difficult for any TV show or film to meet this bar for non-fiction, because even if the footage is real there's still an edit.
The Senna documentary[1] is in the grey area. It's entirely composed of archival footage - no reconstructions, no talking heads, no voiceover. But the filmmaker has still chosen which footage to include and omit and in what order to construct a narrative. I don't think that neatly falls into fiction or non-fiction in your model.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1424432/
> Either the whole thing is non fiction, or it’s fictional.
You miss out on a lot with this way of thinking. The interesting stuff is in the middle.
I don't think that follows. It's fine to recognize that something that isn't non-fiction is fiction, and, frankly, that's the only reasonable thing to do, since you can't know what's true and what isn't. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it just as much as the next person, or get something good out of it.
What am I missing out on if I cannot tell what is and is not fiction? It seems detrimental to assume something is real and then it turns out to be fake (but I will never know).
I'm not sure if anything I say will convey the point because I think you already got what I meant, but think of Santa. During childhood it goes from reality to the middleground of "I wonder if" to later clearly being fiction. Not knowing what is what and later finding out or not is interesting in itself.
Reality TV in Japan is pretty nice. People mostly just spend time driving around the country talking to random people and eating tasty food.
Sometimes they vary the thing and do it overseas.
Any shows you recommend?
I've watched Old Enough! and got hooked on how unpretentious the idea and video editing feels compared to regular Western stuff.
Hard Gay?
/s
I don't know about it being pretty nice - I just think of Nasubi and what happened to him on Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.
I have followed the Up Series for decades, although fewer than six, and I am truly sorrowful at its end. When I was young they felt so far away from me and as I've gotten older I felt as though I have been catching up.
>as I've gotten older:
----
>>We get wise too late,
>>and old too soon.
>>–Danish proverb
----
Everybody I've ever recommended the "7 Up" series to has thanked me. I rewatch them all, every few years – my first viewing was right before my own 21st birthday (decades ago).
https://archive.ph/YvfUV
> Apted acknowledged flaws with the show, saying it was a "horrible error" to have only four women in a cast of 14 when making the original selection
I am more surprised they could only found 14 white kids even in 1964!
A show like this would be very different today.
Why is that surprising? In 1961, the UK was 98.5% British White. By 1971, it was still 97% British White. That fourteen people of that time period would be British White isn't unlikely.
It's always funny to watch people project today's dogma onto a time period when it was wildly inapplicable. "Where's the diversity!?!?!!"
One of the participants, Symon, is mixed-race.
I learned of the 7 Up from the case of Jason Arday, an unexpexted silver lining in an otherwise dismal affair
Whats the link?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday#Other_allegations
He was a compulsive liar (judging from the rest of the wikipedia page), and one of the lies was that he was one of the kids interviewed. It was a lie that was easily disproven because we all can watch those videos.
It is also explained in the link fortran77 posted that got flagged to death.
ahhh Got you. OK. Man, lying about something that easy to disprove is absolutely insane.
A genuinely interesting article. I'd like to know more about how their lives changed throughout the years...
...although there is no reason to want to know that. They are regular people like the neighbor and the mailmen. Gosh, the things TV make us want to do!
The Up series is genuinely interesting though and previous installments directed by the late Michael Apted were critically acclaimed. The fact that these people are normal British people (from various socioeconomic classes) is the point -- you can look at them at different ages and see how the intersection of personality, ability, and class affected their development.
But they all went to the same elementary school!
No, they came from a range of schools. In fact, the premise of the first documentary, before it became a series, was that where children end up in life can be predicted from the social class they started in. But the series outgrew that simplistic idea very quickly.