TV AND THE DAWN OF VOYEURISM

The year 2000 began with a bang as we watched dozens of countries ring in the new millennium without incident. The Y2K hysteria that had reached fever pitch fizzled out in a matter of hours as the citizens of the world realized there would be no Armageddon that day. With the exception of a few newly unemployed IT professionals, life didn’t change very much as the third millennium took the torch from the second.

Although it is not yet complete, the first decade of the twenty-first century has become a decade of voyeurism. This is the decade that has brought us Survivor, Big Brother, The Apprentice, American Idol, and all of their lesser known spin-offs and rip-offs. It has brought us ways to record our lives in manners more sophisticated than ever thought possible before. We can watch and be watched, pretty much any time we want.

In 2000, DirecTV started offering a satellite receiver with integrated TiVo technology. People could watch anything they wanted, any time they wanted. Similar to the VCR, the TiVo device enabled viewers to record their programs so they could watch them later. That is pretty much where the similarities end. Instead of recording onto a cassette tape, the TiVo records onto a hard disk. It records everything a viewer asks it to record, but also things the recorder predicts they might want to see. It allowed viewers to pause TV while it was being shown live, recording the program onto the hard disk so the viewer could catch up later. It also let them capture an entire season worth of episodes of their favorite shows with the touch of a button.

In the same year, the DVD was finally released for widespread home use and the common problem of VCRs eating the cassette tapes of the nation was a thing of the past. Studios scrambled to release new versions of popular movies and within months, thousands of them were released in DVD format. Many people had collections that numbered in the hundreds by the time the year was out. Now able to watch director commentary, deleted scenes and coveted “extras”, the home movie watching experience became infinitely more pleasurable for people who had become accustomed to the high video quality in theatres.

With the availability of the TiVo system, DVDs, and the widespread adoption of satellite services, the problem was quickly becoming the classic “64 channels and nothing on”. Many households had access to hundreds of channels including specialty stations for every conceivable interest, but the common complaint was that there still wasn’t anything good on TV. It seemed that a whole bunch of amateurs got their hands on video cameras and viewers were forced to watch the results.

In May 2000, TV viewers were jolted out of their apathy by a new show in a new genre created by Mark Burnett. Survivor took 16 strangers, plopped them down in the middle of the South China Sea and let them fend for themselves. The world watched eagerly and hungrily as the unscripted soap opera unfolded. Many people hosted Survivor parties and Las Vegas bookies took bets on the winner. Eventually it was corporate trainer Richard Hatch, often not very affectionately referred to as Naked Richard because of his proclivity towards walking around in the nude during filming, who won the unprecedented million dollar prize. (Hatch, it was later discovered, decided he didn’t need to pay tax on his winnings and was subsequently arrested and jailed).

After Survivor came Big Brother, a show which debuted in Holland in 1999 but wasn’t seen in the US until 2000 and was viewed as a Survivor rip-off. Instead of being stranded on a desert island, contestants on Big Brother were sealed up in a house together so the viewing public could watch their interpersonal dramas unfold. The first mainstream television show to actively involve the internet, many of the 70 versions of Big Brother were broadcast live online without editing for language or sexual content. The newness of this premise was wildly popular, and even when networks started charging for access they were inundated with thousands of pageviews a day. A new era of viewing television over the internet was dawning.