Fact Vs. Fiction on "Reality TV"

By Richard Zoglin

In his 1979 movie Real Life, Albert Brooks plays a documentary filmmaker who spends weeks living with a "typical" American family, filming their every move. But his cinema-verite opus runs into trouble, and he decides to salvage it by creating a blockbuster ending: he sets their house on fire. So what, he reasons, if his real-life film suddenly turns fake: "What are they gonna do -- put me in movie jail?"

Well, no one is about to be thrown into TV jail, but a new batch of shows is playing ever faster and looser with the line that separates fact and fiction. These specimens of "reality TV" come in two varieties: those that try to fashion drama out of real life and those that try to make drama look like real life. As the real and the fake get harder to tell apart, ethical and aesthetic questions get trickier.

Exhibit A is America's Most Wanted, the new Fox network series that tries to enlist viewers in tracking down criminals on the lam. Each half-hour episode showcases two or three crimes, with the emphasis on brutal rapes and murders. Witnesses and law-enforcement agents are interviewed, and the crime is shown in a dramatized "re-creation." Viewers are then urged to phone in any information on a toll-free hotline, while investigators stand by to pursue leads. Since its Feb. 7 debut, 13 suspects profiled on the show have been apprehended.

This is not the first time TV has ventured into real-life crime solving. NBC's occasional Unsolved Mysteries specials, for instance, have presented similar crime re-enactments (and helped catch five suspects). But doubtless, what makes America's Most Wanted the highest-rated show on the Fox network's schedule is the tabloid sensationalism of its crime dramatizations. The hand- held camera, slow-motion scenes of violence, and point-of-view shots of the victim cowering or the murderer attacking might have been lifted straight from Friday the 13th. Equally unsettling is the juxtaposition of these lurid minidramas with the appearance of actual witnesses and victims (some of whom have even participated in the re-enactments). Were it not for the show's crime-fighting credentials, this might be called exploitation.

The video-verite style of America's Most Wanted is duplicated in The Street, a fictional series about Newark cops on the beat. The wandering camera and washed-out color give the syndicated show a home-movie look, and the plotless half hours are filled, realistically, with long stretches of small talk. But there are also silly interludes of outrageous comedy (a pair of cops cleaning up vomit in the backseat of their squad car try to figure out what the "little yellow things" are) and a rather smug assumption that anything the camera records, no matter how drably "real," is worth watching. It's not.

Real real life is also becoming more popular as a subject. CBS's documentary series 48 Hours provides behind-the-scenes glimpses of everything from airport congestion to Hollywood dealmaking. Among the new shows coming next fall are Group One Medical, in which real patients and doctors will discuss medical problems in front of an eavesdropping camera, and On Trial, featuring excerpts from actual court proceedings. TV docudramas are exhibiting more fidelity to the facts. The Trial of Bernhard Goetz, airing this week on PBS's American Playhouse series, dramatizes the trial of New York City's subway gunman, with all the dialogue taken directly from court transcripts. But the literal approach is oddly unsettling; without any artistic leeway, the actors (including Peter Crombie as Goetz) seem merely pale imitations of their real-life counterparts.

The only way out of the fact-vs.-fiction morass may be satire, and that is why Tanner '88 is a unique pleasure. The twice-monthly HBO series, directed by Robert Altman and written by Garry Trudeau, follows the campaign of one Jack Tanner, a fictional presidential candidate played by Michael Murphy. He has stumped on location in New Hampshire, spoken at fund raisers and debated strategy with campaign aides, exactly paralleling -- and sometimes commenting on -- the actual presidential race.

Tanner '88 has had fun trying to confuse the line between the real and the bogus: Tanner has crossed paths on the campaign trail, for instance, with | legitimate candidates like Bob Dole and Pat Robertson. But Altman and Trudeau have gone beyond such gimmicks and turned their parallel world into a sly fun- house mirror. The show skewers a host of familiar political types, from the tough-as-nails campaign manager (Pamela Reed), who fends off late-night calls from Joe Kennedy Jr., to the overzealous staff cameraman, who dogs Tanner's every step with his whirring minicam. The candidate, meanwhile, is an earnest but wimpy liberal who quotes Adlai Stevenson at environmental rallies and wilts slowly under a shower of political advice ("You really need to define yourself in relation to the other candidates"). It looks, sounds and feels like the real thing. But it's flagrantly fake -- and funny.