Watched an interesting Robert Redford movie called "The Quiz Show". Its about a popular American Quiz show called "Twentyone", which is based on the concept of a depending champion who is up against a new challenger every week, and if the challenger manages to beat the 'defending champion' , then he becomes the new champion.
The organizers of the show figure out that to hold the interest of the audience and so keep TRPs up... they would need to create a certain 'sense of drama' in each episode. This ranges from having a depending champion stay on for a certain length of time such that he becomes a part of the audience's life, to "dropping off " the incumbent for a new guy as the TRPs begin to taper off... Ofcourse they do all this by revealing the questions to the depending champion till such time that they want him to be on the show...
The charade is up when a former depending champion who has been made to take a dive, exposes the "setup" to a lawyer from Washington. An elaborate inquiry is setup resulting in the organizers of the show being implicated and a loss of face for a prominent professor (The latest champion) who had acquired such fame from this show as to be featured on the cover of TIME magazine... An interesting sidelight is that NBC (National Broadcasting Corp.) and Geritol (The show sponsor) both get off scot free (A case of the bait being to small for the big fish??)
Points to Ponder: Set me thinking about the 'genuineness' of some of the popular quiz shows in India and also is television all about TRPs and contrived drama??
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment