You only have to change one thing: EVERYTHING

Tech made reality television possible. The pre-digital infrastructure was completely cost prohibitive for today’s reality programming. I was an assistant editor making high end commercials the day the first non-linear digital system was shipped to the production company I was working for in 1991. On a weekend shift I was taught how to operate a digital editing tool called the Avid by a wonderful and kind editor named Mike Toumey…he was surrounded by the shipping boxes and a manual in a cramped editing room that opened out onto the main wood paneled lobby of the old Colossal Studios on Rankin Ave in San Francisco. We may have been the only people in the building that afternoon. He showed me how to make an overwrite edit, an insert edit, and how to undo an edit and in the next several months I taught myself how to be a convincing enough digital editor that my career took off (thank you Mike, wherever you are because what you taught me that day bought my house, paid for my son’s private school and took me all over the world and back to grad school).  Before digital (interchangeable with the term “non-linear”) I had been working with celluloid 35MM film transferred to magnetic ¾-inch tape. We worked both on a ‘flatbed’ reel-to-reel type film editing system and on an old DOS powered amber screened computer that controlled a bank of ¾-inch tape machines. Film rolls were generally 400 ft rolls which at 24 frames per second is about 4 mins of footage. That 400 ft roll would need to be purchased, developed and printed, then transferred to ¾-inch tape which meant effectively paying for the roll 3 times over. Today a roll of Kodak 35 mm film goes for about $215 per roll. For a big tent pole scene in a reality TV episode there may be 3 – 7 cameras rolling continuously for 3 or more hours (I worked on a goofy summer stunt show one year where we had upwards to 60 cameras). To shoot on film for a scene with 5 cameras rolling 3 hours would need 225 rolls of 35mm film that’s $48,375. Your average reality scene will have two cameras maybe shooting for two hours – that’s still 60 rolls of film or $12,900. These price comparisons do not include processing the film, making a print, or transferring it to tape or the cost of tape. Nor do they include the cost of renting the five 35mm camera packages or the extra manpower five 35mm film crews would need.

Tech revolutionized how we make TV and what we make. With digital non-linear editing, shows and commercials could be made cheaper, and they could be made faster. In America we use a system called NTSC and in such a system a 30 second commercial has 900 frames per second (24 frame per second film is transferred to tape which runs at 30 frames, 30 x 30 = 900). Pre-digital we often had up to three weeks to produce a good looking first pass rough cut before sending it to the ad agency for the notes process. In the early stages of digital post production digital photography tech was behind digital storage, playback and editing so we still used the old 35mm infrastructure for production. But, in post production (the editing process) we were almost completely digital across our industry within a 3 year period after the first wave of Avids shipped. It’s not apples to apples, but imagine if we went from driving our cars to autonomous cars in under 5 years and you will understand the radical shift that occurred in post production.

With digital editing evolving rapidly and a handful of us young newly minted digital editors in the driver’s seat the timeline began to shorten. Soon it wasn’t three weeks for one version, it was one week with three versions. This happened in a period of a year or two. From there it was a rough cut in the first three days, with a one day rough cut not unusual in commercials. Needless to say rates for our services were not going up congruent with the service provided and the savings taken by the ad industry (us New Guard-ers were just happy to find a niche in an Old Guard world and didn’t ask a ton of questions). All the while digital cinematography was increasing in sophistication and dropping in price as were digital effects. By the end of the 90’s the convergence was complete. In the span of 10 years the film infrastructure that had essentially constructed visual proof of the undeniable coolness, beauty and superiority of the western way of life had evaporated and been replaced with a new workflow – the digital workflow. That digital workflow made reality TV possible.

I had my first experience editing reality TV in the winter of 2002 on a show called Mr. Personality hosted by Monica Lewinsky. The show’s premise had similarities to the Bachelorette in that a woman had to choose her life partner from a pool of 20 or so guys. The catch was that her hunks were wearing ghoulish and foolish masks that covered most of their faces – so our Hetero Hopeful had the daunting task of choosing her mate based on personality only. The meta aspect of using a host that had herself led a life that was its own reality TV show is beyond surreal. At the time I didn’t understand what reality TV even was, nor did I understand I was riding a tsunami of change in the television industry. In retrospect I see that I was walking around in the future and didn’t even know it (the accusation of a cigar dipped in vagina is in retrospect an accusation that could make a whole season or two). It sure didn’t look like the future, more like the industrial revolution.  I had gone from a light filled boutique commercial editorial stable in a repurposed warehouse on the San Francisco bay to a night shift in the basement of the old Fox studio on Sunset at the 101 freeway in Los Angeles. The pay on the reality gig was better than the commercials – not the hourly rate, but the length of the gig. My last remaining commercial clients hired me for 10 days or so from soup to nuts. The reality shows hired for weeks and months at a time, and the experience was completely different than commercial work. We worked in teams of editors with a hierarchy of skill sets and specialties, like a sports team. I’d find myself working on one scene at a time, or just one part of a scene, or just the music on a scene, or just the transitions between finished scenes. It was the factory. 10 hour days, 50 hours a week, as many weeks as you could handle.

Jump forward 15 years and we are now in what is being called the Golden Age of Television. I would agree. The sheer volume, variety, access and quality cannot be disputed. This is possible because at the same time digital production and post production was undergoing a revolution so was content delivery. Advances in technology have cracked open access, delivery and consumption of visual media. Consider also that before the smart phone only those tethered to a computer with internet access or those off work could be content consumers. Now with smart phones and the ubiquity of computers in nearly every profession there isn’t just more stuff to look at but more time to look at stuff. It’s not just a golden age for television, it is a golden age for attention to visual mediums, and in this I will include memes, Instagram, Vines (R.I.P.), TikTok, Twitter and Reddit. There has never been so much attention available. There is an overlay between idleness and productivity…many of us do both. Pre-internet idleness was filled with nature and the physical world and mischief. You had nothing else except the world around you, and if you were at home you could turn on the TV. Idle people used to stop in front of electronic stores to look at the displays. There were horrible tiny televisions in bus depots that you could watch for 25 cents a go. Efficiency in the workplace is increased due to advances in tech which advances logistics and communication which creates more idle time which is filled with media which equals the golden age of television.

This golden age is not for us. We get to look at good TV but it’s not because the companies underwriting them feel a passion to tell our stories. Netflix, Apple and Amazon and who-all-else are not film studios. The medium is not the message in this case, the medium is the master. He who draws the most attention and baits the best worm on their hook wins. These are digital content distributors, managers, factories, warehouses. They also host our red light districts (porn hub et al), our restaurant row (grub hub et al), our hotels (airbnb), our taxis (you know them) our labor force and our shopping malls and increasingly our banking (Sofi, Apple pay, Google cash, PayPal/Venmo). It’s less Disruption and more same old, same old except the competition came in through the front door on the red carpet offering their help for free or invisibly couched in the cost like origination fees and broker fees are tucked in your escrow. Free searches, free delivery, free travel agent, freedom from leaving your couch, cheap cabs, hassle free handyman – free, or cheaper or easier or with less friction. With this simple model (out compete your competitor) tech eats every industry, and then the industries are consolidated within tech giants under the banner of apps. It is not the golden age of TV it is the golden age of tech, the TV is just the spillover from the cornucopia.

On the surface the tech giants are currently in battle for streaming service dominance – but in the background of the Apple TV/Siri, Alexa, Google, Netflix kerfuffle is the real prize: AI. AI is the magic hole that the goodies are spewing from. It is the source of the Nile, the Holy grail, the energy in 5 hour energy drink. Whoever dominates the predicted capabilities of AI will be the next robber barons. AI needs data (mouse clicks from an IP with a real person attached to it). This is a golden age for collecting data.

The tech giants vying for AI dominance need unimaginable amounts of data to refine their machine learning. The more data the better. The current tornado of Apps, the social platforms and the IoT multiverse (internet of things – your ‘smart’ whatever…fridge, thermostat, vibrator) provide this torrent of data. Back when those first Avid non-linear editing systems were shipped a similar stage of development was underway. We were all too happy to steer the ship away from the world of film for this new way of doing things. I remember those quintessential California film industry guys; the old guard, with their Hawaiian shirts, balding domes, bad postures and their gray ponytails. I can see one now, the negative cutter we used to use. He was a guy who got paid a good wage to cut (literally) 35mm film negative with a pair of scissors and then glue it onto the next clip to ‘conform the negative’ for printing of the final positive. It was a vitally important job that we could not do without – until we did without. I remember him hunched over his bench and the smell of the glue as I waited impatiently behind him to take the negative roll to a transfer session. I watched him with curiosity, his old hands winding the reels as he read the edge code of the film, searching and counting frames for his next cut; I could see the future spinning past him as clear as the film spun on the spindle, and he could not. I loved him in that way you do the old technicians and craftsmen above you, but I had a cheap new fast system in my hands that guaranteed his obsolescence and my youth to buffer me from the cruelty of that timeline. I joked with fellow young bucks that I’d come into his office one day and seen a skeleton with a gray ponytail sitting at the bench with a spider web stretched between his skull and his scissors.

I miss those days, I swear I do. It’s not nostalgia, it’s the slower pace and the confidence that things move at a certain speed – which maybe is another way of saying I miss ‘security’. Now it turns out we may all be the negative cutter, with our scissors and our hopelessly outdated view of who we are and what our place in the world is. So many of my patients/clients bring this problem into the room with them and turn it over in the air between us. It is usually framed around the question of job/money/career, but at it’s core it is the existential tensions of that sentence above ‘who we are and what our place in the world is’. It’s in flux, and the meaning we ascribe to it shifts, as does our roll. Hindsight is the only way we ever punctuate the sentence to any satisfaction, and by then we’ve lived whatever it is we are going to live. I’m glad I was working in my corner of media during this radical shift from old to new, for the perspective it gives; but with perspective can come melancholy.

The millions of hours of reality television shot on the thousands of shows was without a doubt a crucial input for developing the tech platforms we have to wrestle with today. YouTube is the natural offspring of Reality TV – an actual real collection of mostly amateur shot footage. The capabilities to capture, store, edit and post to a site was done in concert with the professional world of television production. Our humble friend Reality TV, that lonely, scorned, unrecognized slice of ‘women’s programming’ that STILL does not have a proper place at the Emmy table was without a doubt a key player in the development of our golden age of TV. You are welcome.