“You haven’t seen the last of me!”: 18 reality-show clichés we never want to see again
1. Surprise visitors!
It’s late in the season on Archetypal Reality Competition Show, and a bunch of contestants have gone home, leaving more time to fill with fewer cast members, who are all starting to get a little annoying—time to inject some pathos! Enter a bunch of long-lost family members whom the contestants haven’t seen for upward of three weeks. Moms are the go-to for teary onscreen reunions; babies are good too, if you got ’em. Significant others are acceptable, especially if they’re willing to, say, propose marriage, as Natalie Martinez’s boyfriend did during the 11th season of Big Brother. Beyond that, though, heartstring-pulling reunions can quickly morph into pity parties, such as when Richard Blais had no one to stand for him during this season’s Top Chef finale other than a random uncle.
2. The teary phone call home
If you’re on a reality competition show and a producer hands you a Samsung/Nokia/LG-brand video-equipped cell phone and tells you to call home (while trying to keep the logo in the shot), you might as well pack your bags. Ostensibly, that fleeting glimpse of your wife or newborn might buoy you through the next challenge, reminding you why you’re doing this or whatever; really, it’s the kiss of death. You dare care about anything more than you care about winning this reality competition? Off you go! If you’re on a non-competitive reality show, such as The Real World or Jersey Shore, teary calls home are generally less fraught with peril, and can be a good way to generate camera time and maybe even a little audience sympathy, if you can keep from being a whiny brat.
3. The black-and-white instant memory
What does a second-rate Deadliest Catch knockoff do when it has half an hour to fill, but only one YouTube clip’s worth of honest-to-goodness action? It plays that precious clip over and over, ostensibly to recap the proceedings for viewers. (You know, because the plot threads on Ax Men are so hard to follow.) So if you weren’t paying attention when the hubristic trucker on Swamp Loggers sort of got his back tire stuck in a ditch, don’t worry, you’ll see that pulse-pounding drama again. Except the second time—and every time after that—it will be played in slow-motion black-and-white. The desaturated color instantly ages the clip and applies an ersatz fog of memory, as if the producers are asking, “Hey, do you remember this? Do you remember when the Ray Bans-wearing asshole on this episode of Storage Wars paid a hundred bucks for that locker full of pajamas and old textbooks?” And yeah, we do remember it, because it happened four minutes ago.
4. The “He sure do talk funny!” montage
One of the difficulties faced by reality-show creators is that they are often forced to cast people who do not speak with the comforting Middle American accent long favored by network suits, and therefore, by the viewing public. To avoid terrifying their audiences, producers will single out the different-talking cast member—usually the token Southern guy—for a wacky montage of his zaniest utterances. The key is to intercut the non-standard dialogue with shots of other cast members looking baffled, thus reassuring everyone at home that it’s okay to be confused when J.T. on Survivor says he’s “fixin’ to make a move on all y’all.” (“Fixing”? Isn’t that what the nice man at the garage does to our Chrysler minivan?) Project Runway goes to the funny-talk well as much as any show, and while the bizarre affectations of fashion designers make some of these amusing, they mostly tend toward the moronic, like a sequence in which Tim Gunn is mocked for using such supposedly bizarre words as “ambivalent” and “consternation.” Literacy is hilarious!
5. The ouroboros moment
A staple of cast-reunion episodes, the ouroboros moment occurs when cast members are made to watch goofy clip montages of themselves while also remaining on camera. Trapped in a little picture-in-picture prison in the corner of the screen, that hapless Big Brother contestant has no choice but to smile and laugh as his or her most idiotic, sleep-deprived antics are replayed. Even by the standards of the genre, this setup is exceedingly awkward. It’s bad enough that the cast members are forced to consume their lowlights, akin to a dog’s face being forced into its own mess. But worse yet, they’re expected to offer a nonchalant quip once the tape stops rolling, simultaneously consuming and producing their fake TV character in the same breath.
6. The photo shoot
A high-end photo shoot always seems like it should make for a brilliant setpiece. Bright lights, a professional photographer, expensive hair and makeup: It all says “glamour.” But what’s glamorous on the page doesn’t necessarily look like much on the screen, and on TV, photo shoots play out as what they really are: a bunch of people standing around watching someone try to keep still. Given that reality television is all about people posing and preening for the cameras to begin with, it feels redundant to make the cast members do the same thing in a tamer, more structured setting. Plus, photo-shoot scenes tend to get further bogged down with lame post-production elements, like freeze-frames and fake camera-shutter sound effects. It’s telling that in this studio session from The Celebrity Apprentice, the most gripping moment is Darryl Strawberry calling to order a couple of pizzas.