I went to work for a cable company in 2007. This old timer there told me about his cable TV dog turd theory. His theory said that you could put a camera on a dog turd in your yard and leave it on for a month. When you switched it off there would be hundreds of calls about why this channel was off. There would complaint after complaint that there was a fly that was about to land on the dog turd and they missed it.
Hahaha this person thinks babies are boring
Says the person who’s never had a baby, clearly.
Guy was living the fantasy of a somewhat happy suburban life.
Ads!
The first few seasons of Big Brother UK had nighttime episodes where you could watch the contestants sleeping. They were very popular, and even had catch up shows so you could see what you’d missed 🤷🏻♂️
Same here in Germany, but they weren’t sleeping. People were watching because of all the trash whispering and waiting for the first touchy situations inter the covers.
They even had a time where one channel was broadcasting live nighttime. I think that stopped after a few seasons.
Those first seasons were pure trash, but so naive, compared to what it mutated to over the years.
Wait, there’s the Big Brother show in other countries? What happened with the German one?
In Lithuanian one (they called it the Aquarium, but the idea was the same) two people fucked under the sheets and they broadcasted that on TV, causing massive uproar because apparently the audience wasn’t really ready for that.
In Australia there was a huge uproar during the early seasons because a guy held a woman down while another guy slapped her face with his dick on the livestream they were running. Everyone in Australia learnt the term “turkey slap” that year whether they liked it or not.
Now that’s television!
If Lithuania want to keep their position as the heirs to Rome then they need to get freaky how the romans did.
TIL about Lithuania just straight up lying about their claim as heirs to Rome, and ya know what?
I respect it. It’s honestly the most Roman thing possible, just fucking lying to fuck with people.
To be honest it was probably an attempt to appear as a legitimate European country instead of a gang of savages that the Teutons were trying to paint them as.
Honestly, are you even a European nation of you don’t claim to be the heir of the Roman Empire?
Palemonid Gediminid connection is not only a myth, it’s also kinda silly.
Yeah the format was invented by two Dutch guys. Made them very rich when they licensed the format world wide. And years later one of them created The Voice.
Also this guy, John de Mol, made Fear Factor. So you can probably blame him for keeping Joe Rogan relevant when he was a washed up actor/comedian
It went on for 13 seasons until 2013 and i just found out that season 14 has been running since March 2024, gasp!
In between there have been things like Promi Big Brother, the celebrity version.
Reads post
Has the author not met humans?
Bit of trivia I learned this week… The Truman Show house is Matt Gaetz’ childhood home.
Nothing is sacred in this world!
No way!
It had to be somebody’s house… 😆
And yet it is somehow diminished by this fact.
One could look at it as the movie trying to redeem the house, making sure at least something good came from it. 🤔
That’s true. Plus it’s not the house’s fault. That was unfair of me.
It was understandable reaction to have. I’d be a bit upset about any house having him in it.
This would definitely get hella views on twitch just for the fact that its live 24/7
I’m honestly not sure, I think it’s actually been tried at this point. There’s novelty there, at first, but it has to get boring after awhile. Most people just aren’t that interesting, when you get down to it. Not on a constant 24/7 level.
A guy in Japan already try it, with an hotel that was 24/7 streaming everyone even inside the rooms. The streaming revenue was not enough to keep it ans it had to revert to being a normal hotel.
They had a guy volunteer to be in a room for awhile too, he had a hard time of it:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/entertainment/the-contestant-hulu-documentary-nasubi/index.html
Have you ever watched Jim Carey? Say one thing for Jim Carey. Say he’s entertaining.
Have you ever watched Jim Carrey just sleep? How about scrolling the stock market while taking his morning dump? Brushing his teeth?
How much mundane shit does your average person do in a day?
People would die from boredom, watching me browsing Lemmy at work, at home, commuting and while sleeping.
They would love to see me for over an hour writing a comment, just to discard it, then upvote the great comment i wasn’t able to write a good response to.
Day 17,800
“subscribed to a new community?”
“Yeah, the first new subscription, in 20 years”
He’s entertaining.
one thing for Jim Carey.
he’s entertaining.
The only one that was really able to entertain me non-stop, was Freddie Mercury.
Edit: not saying Jim Carey isn’t entertaining. Jim Carey is absolutely entertaining!
I was saying the parts that started with “say” which I realize now may not have been too obvious
They jazzed it up with fake scenarios specially to boost ratings. Haven’t you seen the movie? That was more of the point than just the fact he was being filmed. His life was all Hollywood bullshit. His own father was “killed off” when he was a kid, but the man didn’t actually die.
I think the point was that there were also paid actors intentionally stirring up drama around him.
Like, how much drama can they pull around a baby?
Especially if it is 24/7 for multiple years.
Most viewers of the Truman Show would probably just watch clip shows or some influencer explaining what happened that day. I know some people listen to 4 hours of Rogan, but many just hear about him from people reporting on his show.
Have you ever raised a baby? They’re 90% drama, 10% sleep. Guaranteed the early days of the Truman Show were flooded with parents watching the actor mom struggle to deal with the constant crying. Crying because hungry, refusing to eat because they’re too busy crying, crying because they’re tired, but too busy crying to sleep. I bet tons of parents were watching it, commiserating, or judging, or arguing about how she should be doing this instead of that. The drama writes itself.
Not to mention the moments when they’re being extremely cute. When they roll over in bed and stare wide eyed at a stuffed toy, then flail at it and coo little baby noises at it. Maybe bite on it and shake it around like a little puppy. People love that shit. If a live stream of a fixed camera in a car cafe can get millions of views, a live stream of a baby doing baby things can easily get lots of viewers.
Fucking hell that is the best description of a baby ever written. I’ve raised three of them now and that is exactly the experience: 90% testing your resolve not to leave them at the fire station and 10% being so ridiculously cute that you would die for them without hesitation.
That’s instincts at work, baby!
Tim Minchin’s Lullaby forever plays in my mind
Well there can be drama between the characters with the baby as the catalyst for the conflict.
Just lock a bunch of writers into a room and don’t let them out until that baby is in peril.
In the early years he would have been barely a prop. Things happen around him but not to him.
You watched Full House season 1, right?
Compare Canonical. Shuttleworth has apparently lost bags of money on his dream, for like decades by now, and apparently only last year or so showed a real profit, but kept on going. Same deal.
Keep in mind his birth was live. They said by random chance in the film, but I suspect they induced labor and this was something like a post-Superbowl event that was hyped up.
So even if the show got boring, everyone would have been aware. So maybe you are just flipping through the channels (as was the style at the time), if the baby shows up you might watch for a few minutes just to see what it’s up to.
Remember Reddit had that hotdog in gelatin? I’d want to check in on that every few months.
The first few years were probably inexpensive and eventually things would get interesting.
Never saw a hot dog in gelatin, but there was one encased in resin
Oh resin! That’s what it was.
That’s terrifying, thank you
Marketing, and this movie came out during the Reality TV era, it was the peak commentary of where we were heading as a society if we stayed on the course we did. Wanting to know everything about someone’s life, start to finish.
(I’m saying that from both the POV of us watching it as well as the people watching from within the movie)
I know that reality TV sort of got its start in the '90s with The Real World, but I don’t think the reality TV era really started until the 2000s. The Truman Show came out in 1998, and I think The Real World (starting in 1992) and Survivor (starting in 1997) are the only ones to predate it.
I think The Truman Show was more a critique of the increasing obsession with celebrity and tabloid news in general than it was of reality TV. In particular, the media frenzy that was the OJ Simpson trial.
However, when I started this comment, I didn’t realize how early The Real World was, so maybes the Reality TV Era did start earlier than I thought. I always associate it more with the writers strike in 2007-2008.
hypothetically, there was also the literal world building around the kid. the enormous ‘set’ would have taken years to build. i can imagine a chunk of early broadcasting demonstrating the build and subsequent soap drama of all the actors to fill that void.
Being lightly scripted, drama would be easy to add:
Oh no, the mom put the baby on the counter near the stove with boiling water!
Oh god, they foreshadowed the whole slew of YouTube channels based on kids and their parents.
