Redshirts

January 30th, 2009Blog0 comments

One of my favorite guilty pleasures is back on: Hell’s Kitchen.

I really like this show. I think Gordon Ramsay is brilliant, and this show features a cartoon version of him where his volume is turned to 11. We get Angry Ramsay, who is just as entertaining as thoughtful culinary Ramsay.

There’s a lot of talk in my circle about Reality TV game design. How/when/why reveals are made, how challenges are designed, etc.. One interesting (disturbing?) phenomenon I’ve been seeing lately is that the producers of the show will often take one or two people who have no business being on the show and put them on — despite the fact that they lack the technical skill or ability to compete.

For instance, a couple of contestants on the new Hell’s Kitchen have never worked in a restaurant before. Since the entire game is based on line cooking efficiency, they’re pretty much doomed from the start — but their presence and eventual elimination makes for great reality television. And if they rise to the occasion? Even better.

Top Chef has been doing this as well. Consider the two people eliminated in the first episode — they were easily the least experienced of the bunch.

In one of his books, Malcolm Gladwell also describes the question that every athlete faces: Do you care enough to continue suffering through the lactic acid? Do you care enough to get up at 5 am every day and hit ten thousand golf balls before lunch? These people — the cannon fodder, or to us nerds, “redshirts” — care about the prize, but they clearly do not care about the process required to get there.

However, redshirting by producers can just be plain unfair. For instance, Stylista, the craptastic show about wanna-bes competing to be an assistant for a fake Anna Wintour: One of the challenges involved the contestants putting together outfits for themselves off the Elle rack.

The rub: One of the contestants was a big girl. BBW. And naturally, all the clothes on the rack were size zero. This led to tears and level 10 butthurt.

Now you can’t say that this was coincidental. The producers’ intention was to incite violence and make this girl cry. That’s just plain unfair — outside the rules of the game. They redshirted someone specifically to crush their gentle spirit.

I think you can still construct good reality television while retaining a basic sense of humanity. In fact, doesn’t that create more compelling TV? When you create game design that causes people to lose because of their own actions?.. And even better, when they win in spite of themselves?