Really, TV?
“Good morning! And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening & good night!”
This memorable line from a relentlessly positive Jim Carrey, living a life of joy and love, oblivious that it was all fake. The only true thing about it all was he, himself. And how real was he, if his life was all made up?
The year is 1998. The Truman Show releases at a time when reality TV has begun to take root in popular culture, in different pockets of the globe.
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Observational TV, largely centred around pranks, can find itself all the way back to 50s America, with Candid Camera. In the 1970s, “An American Family” documented the daily lives of a family, sometimes considered the first ‘reality show’.
But it was MTV’s ‘The Real World’ in 1992 that really felt like a start to modern reality TV, throwing a bunch of young strangers into a house and waiting for things to happen. It certainly is credited with popularising the genre, spawning a new age of shows, with the likes of Big Brother and Survivor lasting for decades (and still going strong). Sub genres spouted across geographies- survival, cooking, variety, singing, challenge, docusoaps. Clearly the line between scripted and not have blurred; situations and environments started being entirely crafted, with the hope that ensuing reactions would be real (and dramatic) enough.
Hold My Sapporo.
Across Asia, as with much else, reality is both embraced and rejected in myriad ways. ‘Cultural nuances’ often mean the genre is made more family friendly, less salacious. Talent and competition shows explode, their enduring popularity rides the cable TV wave and beyond. Challenge and variety shows morph and mutate into wild popularity. In some regions, there is a distinct absence of the high conflict, high drama DNA more likely to drive Western formats. In others, like India, reality and celebrity culture meet to find their own niche.
All this while, Japan (as it does), is kinda on its own trip. As TV networks break all this new ground elsewhere, Japan seems, so to speak, to perpetually have someone to “hold my beer’”
Japanese TV in the 80s and 90s is a roller coaster of creativity. Willingness to experiment with format, content and human nature show up in concepts from the hilarious and odd to the downright bizarre. Japan pushes boundaries in its own ways- game shows/ variety shows with unique, often physically challenging formats, sometimes incorporating elements of real people's experiences. The shows and ideas of this era are often credited with influencing reality formats across the world.
Truman? Who’s that?
The year is 1998. One show takes its ambition a bit further, its ripples felt to this day.
Susume! Denpa Shōnen is a cultural phenomenon in the country, a show with outlandish concepts, stretching contestants to their limits. Its title translates variously as ‘Onwards! Crazy Youth!’ or literally ‘Go Forth, Electro Wave Boy”, standing for an eccentric reality TV style. Challenges tend to be around personal growth or cultural or travel elements- think cycling across Europe, joining a circus, surviving on a desert island, even living in a public bathroom.
By 1998, they have evolved into Susunu Denpa Shōnen, a successor of sorts. A new segment is created. One that would variously include nudity, dog food and a teddy bear.
‘A Life of Prizes’ looks for, and finds, a man who will live in a single room, with nothing but the bare essentials. So far, so garden variety reality-voyeurism.
But this is to be a different sort of ordeal. The premise? The participant must survive only off whatever mail-in prizes he wins from competitions in magazines. This also means he will be naked, because his clothes are taken away at the start, and he doesn’t win any (producers decide to cover his genitals with a floating graphical eggplant).
At the centre of this parade is 22 year old aspiring comedian Tomoaki Homatsu, known as Nasubi, meaning (also) eggplant, a childhood reference to his long head shape. Over the period of well over a year in a windowless room, he enters thousands of competitions, wins hundreds of prizes. Among these are tyres, golf balls, a tent, a globe, and tickets to Spice World: The Movie. At some point he wins sugary drinks and dog food, these help him survive for a time. He wins rice, but has no means to cook it.
Nasubi knows he is being filmed, but believes it an experiment, not even realising that this is being broadcast on TV! This reveal to him happens much later. As a part of Denpa Shōnen, the segment though, becomes wildly popular. And Nasubi is famous.
Genius in residence, creator of the segment and famous Japanese TV producer Toshio Tsuchiya decides to now livestream this grotesque incarceration, because lets face it, that’s what it clearly is now. Cheery graphics and chirpy commentary dilute (presumably) how extreme this has become. In round the clock coverage, Nasubi is seen as malnutritioned, yet grinning his way through this experiment. Critics deride it, but the people are entertained.
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The story has some twists and turns before it ends. Not badly nor well, it just ends.
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This bizarre show and how it shapes the person in it, is showcased in The Contestant, a recent documentary from director Clair Titley . Talking with both Nasubi and Tsuchiya, with plenty of archival footage of the show, it is set to reveal much about what Nasubi felt then and after, what he knew then and what he only found out after. It brings back into focus this “cheerfully sadistic series”(* ) and the questions it prompts. Questions often left unanswered.
The year is 1998.
Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, a movie about a man whose life is entirely constructed for the entertainment of millions of viewers- a construct he has no knowledge of- releases several months after the now notorious segment from Denpa Shōnen. Big Brother launches in Netherlands soon, in 1999.
Reality TV goes from strength to strength, harnessing human drama and psychological pressure in equal measure. Debates around emotional trauma, simulated environments and forced conflict become a consistent feature of the next two decades, but the genre continues its march unabated. People now voluntarily livestream from their rooms. The real and the crafted are sometimes the same.
Everyone can be a contestant, and our social validation forms our own ‘Life of Prizes’.
After.
Nasubi climbed Mt. Everest in 2016. Today , he still occasionally works as a comedian/actor, but spends most of his time as an activist and advocate, working with charities and raising awareness of his beloved hometown of Fukushima, which was devastated in 2011 from an earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster.
After a festival run, The Contestant is on Hulu in the US, hopefully available in Asia soon.
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