I have a very vivid memory of walking into the M-Net foyer during the frantic days of the first production of Big Brother and meeting the eyes of an old colleague across that very crowded room. This was a man I had worked with on and off over the years and he was a drama producer. In his eyes I saw such hurt and betrayal—and I knew what he was saying. “Thank you! Thank you very much!” (his eyes dripped with irony). “You just killed my livelihood!”
All the talk then was of how reality was the new genre and drama was dead. Viewers no longer wanted to see clumsy actors pretending to be real people, they wanted the real thing, unconstrained by the awkward appendage of narrative, unfettered by structure or message; they wanted life as lived by people like them (and carefully crafted and filtered by rooms filled with producers, but they didn’t want to think about that). Now, four years on, where do we find ourselves? M-Net show very little sign of wanting to commission any more reality after the very limited impact of Project Fame and The Block last year. As Carl Fischer, head of M-Net local content, put it when I spoke to him on the subject: “With reality, the local version has to be better than the overseas product to be a real hit. And our viewers are flooded with international reality shows on the other DStv channels.” The other terrestrial channels only ever picked up on reality in a very half-hearted way and are more than happy to put it down again. And everyone is talking about drama. “You can’t beat drama. We need more.” Carl Fischer says there will be at least two more dramas on M-Net by the end of the year, maybe more. SABC 1 have struck out boldly with Mzansi and are talking about replacing The Bold and Days with locally produced shows, e.tv has just launched Scandal which bares a passing resemblance to the show SABC 3 is about to launch, Hard Copy.
Just a glance at the ARs for December tell the story very clearly. The top shows on four of the five channels are dramas. Generations tops the list with an AR average of 14,5, 7de Laan averages 9,5, Isidingo 7,8 and Egoli 4.
But this is not just a local phenomenon. All six of the top rated shows across all networks in the US are dramas, with the blockbusters of yesteryear like Survivor and Idols hovering down at nine and ten.
What is it that viewers so love about drama?
Mfundi Vundla, creator of both Generations and Backstage believes that it is about status. ” I was the first guy to show black people as beautiful and successful. That was ten years ago. I came here from the States where my training was in commercial TV so it was obvious to me. This is what is going to sell. I still can’t believe that nobody has copied my idea.” The success of Generations certainly seems to support this view. The allure of watching pretty people in lavish environments getting endlessly involved in their own feelings is undeniable. The cynics boil it all down to shopping and sex. That’s what we would all rather be doing than worrying about the car service or the kid’s homework and that is what soaps provide; endless movements up and down of either the credit card or the zip at the back of her dress.
But there are forces in the contemporary TV environment that seem to be saying that the stories we tell each other on the tube should not be determined only by what keeps our eyes widest and our hearts beating fastest.
There is a very clear message coming from the SABC that TV, and particularly TV drama, has an important role to play to guiding viewers towards a more positive view of themselves and their country. “Aspirational” is a word one hears repeated over and over.
That is certainly not a new word. We have been hearing it for many years but the context seems to have shifted.
When I as hired by Gray Hofmeyer to head the writing team on Isidingo our brief was very clear. “One Nation Viewing” it was called then. We had to create a series that would be watched by all sections of the population. So we set out, in a rather idealistic mood, to tell a story that straddled the divisions of the nation. Our story was about an awkward community spanning rich mine managers and poor underground workers brought together by the economic imperatives of the gold mine, and we prided ourselves on making it as “real” as possible. (We could get sidetracked here by the epistemological minefield one enters when one claims that anything is “real”, but let’s skirt that one). The point was we succeeded, I think. The ARs showed that we had reached the nation. About sixty percent of the viewers were black, and about thirty percent white.
The trouble was that the advertisers were not attracted by our little mining town, nor to the people who watched it. These were not people easily moved by the shots of four-by-fours standing proud and triumphant on top of impossibly inaccessible bits of semi-desert, nor people who ever might run the risk of wearing suits that magically disappear on a Sun International golf course. These people were too real for that. And so, just as very few billboards would ever have been erected in the fictitious Horizon Deep, very few ads appeared on the show. An instruction came down from management “make it more aspirational” which translates into “make it more advertiser-friendly”. And so you have the slick and youthful world of the TV station on the Isidingo of today, and the dusty mine dumps have been entirely swept from view. To its credit, Isidingo is now spoken of as a show of unquestionable quality, a jewel in the crown of our industry, and it’s ad breaks are jam-packed, so the move must have been a success.
That was a while ago. Now the SABC are still encouraging stories that are aspirational, but what they mean by that seems to have shifted. It no longer means “advertiser-friendly”. It translates to mean that the lives we see on TV should be ones that give ordinary people something to aspire to, not ones that mirror their fears. It seems to be based on a view that popular culture in SA has an ethical obligation to be encouraging. That social ills such as crime, poverty, corruption and illiteracy should be handled with extreme caution. The national broadcaster is taking very seriously it’s role as shaper of the national sense of self; our national Dr Phil. Many might argue that this is preferable to them taking on the role of a national four-by-four salesman, but the paradox is that it boils down to a similar outcome. We get drama that reflects a slightly idealised, middle-class world where the problems are small ones and the delights are many.
This tacking towards the middle of the road is not restricted to SABC. M-Net’s Snitch will not be recommissioned because, as Carl Fischer puts it, it was “a little too edgy for some of our viewers”. Though he added that this was not the only reason, this caution around anything risqué is something we drama producers have to confront repeatedly. Perhaps we have to start accepting that there is an inherent conservatism to the South African public. I was taken to task by a member of the press recently for showing two shots of a dead body in the first episode of Mzansi, when one would have been sufficient. It seems that when watching imported drama South Africans are very indulgent of splattered blood, ripped bodices and the full-blooded pejorative reference to the human generative organs, but those standards are considerably tighter when the drama comes home. I suppose it is a version of the understandable view that if your neighbour’s daughter sleeps around you can smile about it; if your own does it is scandalous. But this mindset considerably narrows the range of local stories we can tell on TV.
I think we have to return to the question of why viewers are choosing to watch more drama on TV these days. It’s my guess that in the increasingly standardised world, where the kids in Kiev are now wearing pretty much the same as the teenagers of Tijuana, identity has become the key. What does it mean to come from the corner of the world where I live? Across history we have always told each other stories to remind one another what makes us different, what to look up to, what to fear. Now the medium of that story telling is television.
As veteran scriptwriter and newly-appointed head writer of e.tv’s Scandal, Richard Beynon puts it thus: “There is an ongoing and increasing intense debate about identity which is raging in our society. And the parameters of that debate are set by popular culture.”
There are three forces that bare down on the stories we see on TV: the need to entertain the audience, the need to sell advertising space to pay for the story, and the need to be part of a nation-building agenda. (The last factor applies mostly to drama on the SABC, but the other channels cannot entirely ignore it). As long as we accept those forces there is plenty of work for drama producers right now, but we need to know that the latitude on our stories is a restricted one. What is getting very hard to tell is the story that tells the difficult truth, that takes an oblique view of the epic, exciting drama that we are all living within in this country; the drama of being a South African today. Those are the ones struggling for life beneath the humdrum, still longing to be told.
Neil McCarthy is head writer and executive producer on the second series of Gaz’lam, and co-creator of Mzansi (both on SABC1). In the early ’90s he headed up the writing department for the conceptual and developmental stage of Isidingo (SABC3) and subsequently became head of the creative department for Endemol and series editor on the first series of Big Brother (M-Net).