What Are We Learning From Cable Shows? -- III

Gold Rush is yet another extremely popular cable show:

Discovery Channel Struck gold on Friday Dec. 11 [2020] as two series, GOLD RUSH and GOLD RUSH: WHITE WATER, broke ratings and viewership records for the season. GOLD RUSH was the #1 program on ALL OF TELEVISION among Men, beating all broadcast networks, including CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX. On cable, GOLD RUSH and GOLD RUSH: WHITE WATER topped all networks among both Adults and Men.

The development we're starting to see here, now a decade and more in process, is a completely new style of television entertainment that's eclipsed the sitcom of the 1950s and 60s. I suspect that the new genre has been so effective -- remember that people are now paying extra, directly, for these shows via cable subscriptions, when I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best were "free" -- that people have even become less nostalgic for the old ones. With good reason. This says mostly good things about the current state of our culture.

The "stars" of Gold Rush aren't in fact very Hollywood. None is conventionally handsome. They wear dirty jeans, work boots, hard hats, and safety vests. They aren't especially well spoken; Parker Schnabel is normally taciturn, and when he elaborates, he's tactless. Tony Beets is not only blunt and taciturn, what apeech he utters is so profane, the bleeps are nearly constant. In fact, all of them often simply act like bullies and jerks. This is anything but escapist fantasy.

The episodes show little or no leisure activity. There's a weigh-in scene at the end of each week's events in which each team gathers with carefully masked bottles of beer, but that's pretty much it. Everyone is driven. An odd byproduct is that in a sense, the show makes workaholics somehow appealing.

If elite culture thinks "white people" enjoy shows like this because there's some sort of nostaligic retreat to a world of Leave it to Beaver or Dick Van Dyke, nothing could be farther from the truth. If there's escapism in such a reality-based show, it's escapism only in the sense that being a workaholic is a form of escape from the family, which is a recognized motive for being that way -- if you're at the office 'til 11 PM, you're in fact not with your family, and to such people, that's not a bug, it's a feature.

I don't think it's coincidence that so many of these very popular cable shows portray mostly men in environments, from Oak Island to the Bering Sea to gold mines in the Yukon, where their families are absent. Most in fact do have families, but wives and daughters, while they sometimes appear, aren't primary figures and, with only a few exceptions, don't normally accompany the men. Plot devices do sometimes take particular men away from certain episodes due to family issues, but their function is simply to make the men absent. When the men return, they resume their near-exclusive focus on the work.

The big exception that proves the ruie is the Beets family, since Tony's wife clearly sets policy and runs the finances with a firm hand, and most of their children also live on site and work in the family mining business -- but they're hardly the Brady Bunch. Although they don't appear to be religiously observant at all, there's a certain Old Testament atmosphere in the family's dedication to a common purpose via hard work, thrift, and resourcefulness.

I think that the Beets family is so unusual for such a show reflects the continuing crisis of the US family that began in the early 1960s, certainly with the advent of more effective birth control. Where TV shows before that time centered on the nuclear family, presenting an idealized picture of suburban life without serious crisis, by the Obama era, the most popular general-insterest shows effectively dropped the family as any kind of focus and left that issue for someone else to handle.

"Reality" shows are in fact scripted in whole or part. The main action in Gold Rush episodes hinges on often unpredictable factors -- mechanical breakdowns, technical surprises, weather, injuries, other emergencies -- but it requires editing to stitch the pieces into a coherent narrative. What's intereting is the more obviously scripted action the producers constantly insist on inserting, excited whoops, cheers, high-fives, man hugs and such (my wife and I note that Parker Schnabel and Tony Beets are apparently exempt, but everyone else must do these things at the producers' behest). I think this is an effort, possibly even conscious on the part of the producers, to replace bonds of affection and familiarity that are otherwise missing without conventional family bonds.

This is a reflection of what popular entertainment is now telling us about the culture.