Köln. It’s noisy in the poorly equipped reality camp – even though it’s the middle of the night. Helena Fürst, once known as the “lawyer for the poor” in the RTL evening program, now a riot in all reality formats, is loudly upset regarding her fellow campaigners. Trigger of the Zoff: Fürst wants to sleep, the rest of the camp wants to chat – it comes to a scandal.
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It’s a scene you know only too well from reality shows. Some candidate starts a fight, others jump in and provoke. Then the director fades in dramatic music, zooms in on the angry faces in slow motion and with black-and-white effects, films every insult or physical violence, no matter how underground – in order to then present it to the television viewer with relish and a large portion of spite.
But this time something is different: the screen suddenly goes black. In large, white letters, the viewer is told: “To protect everyone involved, the production was interrupted. For Helena Fürst, the time in the camp ended that night.” The incident is not explained in more detail. It is a novelty in the German reality cosmos.
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The “celebrity atonement” wants to do everything differently
The scene described comes from the new Pro-Sieben program “Das Große Promi-Büßen” – a classic riot reality show, which obviously wants to do something different than its much-criticized predecessors.
The format has a moral superstructure, it seems like a middle ground between cheap entertainment and a touch of world improvement – although the latter is probably not meant as seriously as claimed.
The concept of the show: Eleven “celebrities”, who you may know from other reality formats, are crammed together in a camp on Erzberg in Austria and behave as usual next to it. This time, however, the raised index finger hovers over everything: Here in the camp they should atone for their sins.
Private television in the pillory: is trash TV over?
With the first season of “Big Brother”, more and more trash TV shows have been growing since the 2000s and now fill entire evening programs.
© Source: RND/Matthias Schwarzer
Mob celebrities show remorse
There are candidates who have already attracted negative attention in other reality formats. Matthias Mangiapane and Carina Spack, for example, are the originators of one of the biggest bullying gossip that has ever flickered across German TV screens. In the Sat.1 trash show “Celebrities under Palm Trees”, which has since been discontinued, they had finished co-candidate Claudia Obert in front of the cameras so that she finally burst into tears and had to sleep on the floor in the living room. Viewers were then outraged by the behavior and the broadcaster Sat.1.
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Other candidates attracted attention with other missteps. A participant by the name of Calvin Kleinen is known for his sexist sayings, a Youtuber named Simex became famous with questionable content on the video platform – here he is said to have thrown dog feces at people, among other things. All candidates should be confronted with their misconduct in the course of the show.
Drag queen Olivia Jones takes care of that. She shows Mangiapane excerpts from his bullying attack, the camera films his reaction. At first Mangiapane still smiles defiantly, later he actually shows something like remorse. Other candidates such as Carina Spack, apparently ashamed of their own behavior, begin to cry during the confrontation.
What shoud that?
What is this show for? Well, Pro Sieben probably didn’t discover morality for itself entirely by accident. Nor should the “big celebrity penance” be regarding entertainment alone. In fact, the private broadcasters are in a big quandary with their trashy reality formats.
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The cheap shows, recently often a toxic mix of alcohol abuse, sexism, homophobia and total escalation, bring good ratings – but they no longer fit the time. The protest from the audience is huge following every scandal, and the broadcasters have to explain themselves once more and once more. And: The formats no longer fit the new image that all the big private broadcasters actually want to give themselves.
The broadcaster RTL had recently removed various offensive formats from the program that had actually brought reliable ratings. Symbolic of this is the expulsion of Dieter Bohlen from the riot casting show “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”, which, as is well known, has now been reversed.
Image change at Pro Sieben and Sat.1
The ProSiebenSat.1 Group has also completed a 180 degree turnaround. Questionable formats were an integral part of Sat.1 for many years, but the broadcaster has now announced that it will drop the scripted reality genre from the program. Pro Sieben, on the other hand, repeatedly brings political formats into the program and poached well-known faces from public broadcasting. Despite the mediocre ratings, the broadcaster intends to stick to the news magazine show “Zervakis und Opdenhövel live”.
Classic trash TV simply no longer seems compatible with this change in image. In the “Summer House of the Stars” on RTL, candidates had recently spat on each other, later the basketball player Andrej Mangold started an excess of bullying in front of the camera once morest another candidate.
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Previously, Sat.1 had already exploited the bullying complaint from Spack, Mangiapane and “Life Coach” Bastian Yotta on “Celebrities under Palm Trees” and had to reap a lot of criticism. Just one year later, Sat.1 showed a homophobic hate tirade in the same format. Mob prince Marcus von Anhalt covered a participating drag queen with anti-gay insults.
Reality TV is getting braver
“Celebrities under palm trees” has now disappeared from the Sat.1 program, other trash formats have been noticeably defused. The last “Summer House of the Stars” on RTL last year went without scandalous incidents. However, this was also quickly noticeable in the ratings – these were, in contrast to previous seasons, rather average.
“The big celebrity penance” now seems as if the format is testing the possible future of reality TV. A show concept that is compatible with the highly sensitive culture of outrage in social networks – and yet does not have to do without the greatest possible riot, bullying and sexism.
Although the questionable behavior of the participants continues to be shown, all of this is legitimized by reprimanding and punishing it.
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Still, missteps happen
The candidates cast together are just as toxic and narcissistic as ever. They are all known as sources of escalation from other formats – if they meet, it becomes level. That’s probably why they were invited.
Already in the first episodes, the protagonists fall back into their well-known patterns. The group has zeroed in on Helena Fürst, who in turn lets herself be provoked by every little thing. Bullying icon Carina Spack says at some point that Fürst wants “almost nobody here”. It’s the well-known game: all once morest one.
Calvin Kleinen, who is supposed to be paying for his sexist rhetoric, is shown for minutes commenting on another contestant’s breasts – only to be admonished in a later episode by Olivia Jones.
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The future of reality TV?
Of course, the games and challenges are just as inhuman as in any other format. Sometimes the participants have to shovel masses of butter into themselves, sometimes the candidates have to wrestle in the mud and are then not allowed to shower, sometimes someone has to empty the chemical toilet of the other camp residents for days as a punishment.
After all, when it finally gets too colourful, what all other formats have loved to do without happens: the production company interrupts the show, throws candidate Helena Fürst out of the format and also refrains from exploiting the incident. It’s a small but much-needed ray of hope from reality hell. Will the viewers follow the new path?
The format is still getting mediocre ratings – nothing is known regarding the number of views from the media libraries. At the start, 1.18 million viewers watched, in the second week the number dropped to 1.13 million. In any case, it doesn’t look like the future of reality television.
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