DOCUMENTARY HYBRIDS

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DOCUMENTARY HYBRIDS

• reality TV
• fly-on-the-wall series
• reality series
• fact-fiction
• faction

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A current staple of international television

• international trade in formats
• Big Brother, Popstars, Pop Idol, etc.
• moved factual programming into primetime
• scripted v. unscripted
• significant marketing tie-ins
• but fading novelty value?

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Varieties of hybrid formats

• Talk shows
• Video diaries
• Lifestyle programmes
• Reality-TV
• Docu-soap
• Reality gameshows (game-docs)

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Hybrid formats

• Talk shows
• studio-based confessionals
• Oprah Winfrey Show, Jerry Springer Show
• Video diaries
• home-based confessional
• often segments within other hybrids
• Lifestyle programmes
• personal improvement, consumer address
• DIY programmes, Extreme Makeover

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Hybrid formats II

• Reality-TV
• original formats - late 1980s/early 1990s
• rhetoric from current affairs agenda
• surveillance and accidental camcorder footage
• heavily narrativised, tightly packaged
• Cops, Americas Most Wanted, Worlds Wildest
  Police Chases, Caught on Tape, New Zealands
  Funniest Home Videos

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Hybrid formats III

• Docu-soap
• soap opera narratives
• hand-held camcorder aesthetics
• significance of casting
• issues of performance
• editing out
• natural locations Airline, Cruise
• situation documentaries Wife Swap, Faking It
• celebrity docu-soaps Simple Life,

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Hybrid formats IV

• Reality gameshows (game-docs)
• centred on competition within unnatural setting
• surveillance environments
• significance of casting
• flickers of authenticity
• multi-platform media events
• Big Brother, Survivor
• The Apprentice, Pop Idol

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Transformed non-fiction

• Filmmakers agenda
• reality as diversion
• Textual construction
• playful (rather than authoritative)
• reliance on personalised forms of knowledge
• acknowledgement of performance
• highly reflexive
• Audience expectations/assumptions
• various forms of participation

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Debates over hybrids

• dominance of commercial broadcasting over public
  service ideals
• evidence of a wider collapse in social values
• the absence of reality on television
• provide a space for the common voice
• evidence of the change to a surveillance society

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Debates over hybrids

• erasure of boundaries between public and private
• change from rational, objective modes of
  communication to emotional, intuitive modes
• provide a space for the playing out of anxieties
  and fears

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• The Documentary Screen
• SMST306-06B
• Exploring the documentary genre and related forms
  - drama-documentary, mockumentary, documentary
  hybrids, etc.