The latest series was due to culminate this summer with the 2020 Olympics but production was finally suspended on 13 April, “to give top priority to the health and safety of [our] cast and staff.” In the meantime there are 36 episodes and three previous series to watch on the site. As traditional broadcasters scramble to fill their schedules, Netflix is primed to capitalise on the fact that they offer an apparently bottomless opportunity to binge.
“Netflix seems to be trying to position itself as the pandemic streaming service,” says Horeck. “Binge-watching has always been central to its business model, as a way to lock viewers in 24/7. Its main goal is to colonise everyone’s attention – its CEO Reed Hastings famously said that Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep. So it has always been ready for a pandemic in a way, and this is its ultimate fantasy of the viewer – trapped inside, unable to go out, locked in a one-to-one engagement with the Netflix interface.”
Can reality TV fill the gaps?
With the cancellation of major sporting events including the 2020 Olympics, Euro 2020 and Wimbledon leaving vast holes in TV schedules, there have been calls on social media in the UK for Channel 4 to repeat, or upload to their streaming service, All 4, the first few series of Big Brother from the early noughties. As well as soaking up hours and hours on the schedules, they could simultaneously chime with the zeitgeist and offer audiences the kind of comfortable, nostalgic viewing they appear to crave at the moment.
“The first series was fundamentally people sitting around, looking after chickens and not doing very much at all. That’s what we’re all doing right now,” says Taylor. “I think it would be incredibly popular. And it’s a far more guilt-free exercise now. Reality TV takes up a lot of time. What else do you have to do now? Absolutely nothing.”
In the meantime the race is on for new television shows which can be made in accordance with social-distancing rules. Reality television is relatively cheap to make and fairly easy to operate at a distance once the cameras are in place, so could be the genre to triumph in these adverse conditions, when soap operas, dramas and shows with live audiences are forced to suspend filming. Too Hot to Handle, like The Circle, proceeds without a presenter, instead delivering instructions by means of a virtual host.
Given the superficial similarities of life under lockdown with traditional reality formats, it won’t be long before the first pandemic programming hits. “Reality TV brings together so many different genres – the soap opera, the gameshow, the melodrama, the talk show, even sport,” says Horeck. “Some kind of Reality TV docu-series about Tinder and dating remotely in the age of the pandemic will surely be next.”
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