In 2009, for example, when recession and the prospect of perpetual war were rocking the United States, viewers looking for “real life” content were offered bafflingly stylized, even surreal shows like Cops, Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, and Toddlers and Tiaras. The rise of true crime in recent years makes a lot of sense when you consider how fragmented American nonfiction television programming had become by the end of the 2010s. Where shows like Unsolved Mysteries or Forensic Files had run on a strange mix of voyeurism and altruism, with the viewer at home playing star witness, reality television would run on voyeurism alone-while proving easier and less expensive to make than documentaries. From Judge Judy to 1992’s smash hit The Real World, American entertainment in the 1990s took all that was most engaging about mystery documentary shows (real personalities, real stakes, a constant revolving door of content) and made it personal. Unsolved Mysteries-a show that despite its fantastical mix of genres saw 260 of its featured cases later resolved, sometimes through viewer tips, according to The New York Times-simply didn’t feel novel anymore.Įlsewhere on television, a new genre with a different and more compelling spin on blurring fact and fiction would soon undercut the whole mystery genre: reality TV. By the time home footage became a part of TV’s language ( Candid Camera, etc.), those who might have watched Unsolved Mysteries were switching to fiction: The X Files scooped up the UFO-enthusiast market as soon as it aired in 1993, and helped mold anti-government conspiracy speculation into its own entertainment genre. One segment, building on the era’s “Satanic Panic,” argued that a teenage boy’s suicide was a Dungeons and Dragons–based murder plot. Its episodes spooled through schlocky reenactments done by actors (including Matthew McConaughey, in his first credited screen role), extracting maximum drama from minimal fact. Unsolved Mysteries was made in the opposite style. They added a dignified presenter in a trenchcoat named Robert Stack (whom you may know from his role as Eliot Ness in NBC’s The Untouchables) and mixed the missing persons cases in with UFOs, wild speculation about the Freemasons, and stories about criminals on the run to watch out for in your local supermarket. Sensing a golden opportunity to expand their hit specials into more profitable long-form entertainment, the Missing: Have You Seen This Person? producers Terry Dunn Meurer and John Cosgrove came up with a formula for a consumer-friendly, somewhat battier weekly version. In 1985, NBC ran a series of surprise-hit specials called Missing: Have You Seen This Person? Several of the featured cases were solved by the American everyman watching at home, and a new kind of television show came to life. While the original Unsolved Mysteries needed the opening disclaimer to distinguish itself from news broadcasts, news is where it got its start. The reboot -imitating a show that relied on mass moral panic to justify covering alien sightings side by side with child sexual assault -is fatally confused about where its allegiances lie. But TV has moved on from the theatrical ’80s vibe of the original series. Now Netflix has revived the show, adjusting its format for contemporary tastes and hoping to capitalize, presumably, on the true-crime revival that has swept podcasting ( Serial), publishing ( I’ll Be Gone in the Dark), and television (too many to list) in recent years. “What you are about to see is not a news broadcast.” So ran the voiceover at the start of each episode of the classic 1980s Unsolved Mysteries, a pioneer docuseries thriving at the intersection of the factual and fantastical.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |