Thanks to CBS the US, like Britain this week, has its very own Big Brother. Here is a riveting scene from the homegrown version of the Dutch TV peepshow. Man enters kitchen carrying unprotesting chicken. Chicken's head flops around at odd angles. Housemates leap up, rushing to assist comatose fowl. "Is that chicken dead?" hysterical woman sobs. "I don't know," man answers, "but he ain't lookin' great."
Okay, this is not Euripides. It is not even Mamet on a bad day. But so far, it's as good as Big Brother gets. That would be good enough, CBS hoped, to lure primetime viewers from the wild frontier of cable channels - where every weird taste is indulged - back to the heartland of network television where wholesome American values were broadcast in the sitcom-and-soap heyday. This week Channel 4 jumped on the reality TV wagon and started broadcasting a British version
There is more at stake here than ratings. (the US version of Big Brother rebounded from an initial low of 6 million viewers to an encouraging 10.5 million on July 10th.) As President Clinton likes to say: "This is about who we are as a people." The president - with comatose chickens of his own to revive in the Middle East peace talks and Al Gore's campaign - has yet to weigh in on Big Brother. Other cultural critics, however, see the voyeuristic gameshow as an alarming symptom of the US's intellectual decline and social alienation.
"The family TV is metamorphosing from a comforting electronic hearth into an aggressive probe prying into closets of ordinary folk," Robert Sheppard recently wrote in MacLean's magazine. ("Ordinary folk," meanwhile, debase themselves daily on the Jerry Springer Show and similar freak-fests.)
Prof Robert Thompson, correcting Sheppard, argues that the hearth burned out long ago and that exploitative shows such as Big Brother could reunify the US TV nation. "The fragmentation of the audience is the big story of the 20th century," Prof Thompson, founder of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, maintains. "For over 60 years, in the networks' prime, Americans fed from the same cultural trough daily. At no other time in history - not even under the medieval church - did so many people share a common cultural reference. Cable television and target marketing changed that. But `reality television' might return viewers to the network fold."
The excitable Prof Thompson may exaggerate. Big Brother is not the Second Coming. It is, however, a sensation in the US - and an enormous network gamble. Launched earlier this month, the US show appears five nights a week until the end of September and constantly on the Internet.
The set-up is simple: moronic, actually. Ten people volunteer to live together non-stop for three months under constant surveillance from 28 cameras and 60 microphones. Their purpose-built California home has one bathroom and an outdoor swimming pool.
There are no labour-saving devices, no dishwashers or clothes dryers. Telephones, televisions, computers and newspapers are forbidden. The housemates - all in their 20s or 30s - must grow vegetables and raise chickens. Hence the riveting fowl emergency. (Later on Day 4: "Maybe we should give him CPR or sump'n?" "Yeah, maybe try blowin' some ahr inna him?")
Like Survivor (Castaway 2000), CBS's triumphant game show set on a flea-bitten tropical island, Big Brother is an elimination game. Housemates select residents for dismissal and the audience votes by telephone on who should be evicted. One of three finalists will win $500,000. (The prizefund in the UK, by comparison, is a mere £70,000.)
There are two African-Americans, an Asian-American, a one-legged man, a self-confessed virgin with a nose ring, a mother, an exotic dancer, a hairy fatboy who likes to waddle around in his underwear, a beauty queen and . . . a 10th person. It doesn't matter. After the first halfhour, you are so concussed by the stupidity of the "conversations" that you cannot tell one from the other. So far, the most dignified individual is the chicken which attempted suicide on Day 4.
Well, it was quite a day. "Day 4," the gravel-voiced announcer portentously declares, "Josh Asks Jordan About Her Boyfriend." The kitchen again. Muscular Josh swigs a Budweiser. Jordan stirs something flaccid in a steaming pot. She talks of love. "So I'm totally like `Is this real or should I be, like, more, like, you know, crazy for him?' " On it goes until even the pasta is screaming.
Day 5 brings little relief. Brittany (or is it Jordan?), floating in a rubber ring, discusses her sexuality. The guys loll around the pool, working on their tans. Close-up of feet touching. Ooh! Chicken still in intensive care. "In order to give the chicken its medicine," the announcer reveals in a tense, Attenborough-ish whisper, "the housemates must first distinguish it from the rest." The chicken - like the viewers - is having a similar problem.
Let's try to forget Day 6 when the moody African-American male and the bubbly blonde female coyly compare the size of their respective behinds. As Brittany might say, "Puh-leeze".
How did it come to this? How did we domesticate the Big Brother of Orwell's nightmare and transform it into a TV game show? "Voyeurism is wired into us," Prof Thompson argues. "Back in the caves we probably indulged it. And television and voyeurism were made for each other. Today, Peeping Tom doesn't have to go to the window. The window comes to him, five nights a week." Or 24 hours a day on countless websites, from the banal to the pornographic.
Losing viewers to cable channels and belatedly recognising the interactive potential of television and the Internet, CBS gambled and won with European imports such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Survivor. The economic advantage was obvious. A game-show is cheap, costing one-third of the $2 million spent on a one-hour drama such as The X Files. And a successful game-show is addictive. "You had millions of people watching Survivor night after night," Prof Thompson recalls, "all saying how bad it was."
Whatever their artistic merits, neither Survivor nor Big Brother is a groundbreaking original. That title belongs to An American Family, the landmark 1973 documentary which followed the fortunes of the Loud family and which launched "reality television." It soon emerged, however, that viewers prefer their screen reality spiked with disaster, hence an epidemic of such shows as When Good Pets Go Bad, Divorce Court, and, more recently, Divorce, a game show in which divorcing adversaries compete to see who wins the combined property. The game-show audience wants tears, but it also wants blood.
Big Brother has yet to deliver either. Brittany, the pierced virgin, blubbers a lot and Day 6 brings "racial tension in the kitchen". But so far the show is about as stimulating as being incarcerated in an ugly house with 10 morons. "Survivor was brilliantly produced by comparison," Prof Thompson agrees. "Its editors created each dramatic episode out of perhaps 13 hours of footage. Editing Big Brother the day before, there just isn't time to craft a compelling drama."
Unfair? Consider Day 6:
Comatose chicken returned to its flock in prison-like yard. "This is like one of them Kodak moments for 'im," tearful George declares. Women hug and sniffle.
"What drives reality shows is their immediacy," psychologist Gregory Fouts of Calgary University recently observed, "They are like sporting events." Unlike sporting events, however, they allow viewers to identify with people who look - and act - like them. For an increasing number of isolated Americans, this may constitute a social connection, says Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. "Every 10 minutes you spend commuting cuts your social activity by 10 per cent," Putnam remarked in a recent interview. "Today, fewer families eat dinner together or have friends over. We're watching more television, but we're watching it alone."
Interactive "reality-based" shows such as Big Brother create not just competitive suspense, but a mundane intimacy that feels like the real thing. To a generation raised and socialised by the medium, it may indeed be the real thing. "There may even be a need for television's approval," Sheppard speculates in MacLean's magazine. "For some, life may not have meaning until they've actually been on TV." This is more Aldous Huxley's vision than George Orwell's, a Brave New World subduing its creatures with pleasure, not a totalitarian state inflicting pain.
CBS's Big Brother is tedious, not sinister. But the show's erosion of the barrier between private and public behaviour troubles some analysts. "It's not really clear that we do care about privacy anymore, even though changes in law and technology are reducing the backstage areas in which we can retreat from public view, where we are protected from being misjudged by strangers," says Jeffrey Rosen, author of The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America.
To which Brittany might respond: "A game show is, like, fun. It's not, like, serious." She's right, as it happens. "Reality television" is not that real. Big Brother is entertainment, not anthropology. As an anthropological record, however, it could give future generations a candid glimpse of their ancestors, complete with Valley Girl accents. Now that, Mr Orwell, that really is depressing.
Big Brother is on Channel 4 on Monday at 8 p.m.
See Eddie Holt's TV review, Weekend 7
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The US Big Brother is at www.webcentre.bigbrother2000.aol.com
To watch the housemates in the British version of Big Brother, and to vote to ditch them, seek out www.channel4.com/bigbrother where the webcast continues 24 hours a day.