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Reads post
Has the author not met humans?
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The first few seasons of Big Brother UK had nighttime episodes where you could watch the contestants sleeping. They were very popular, and even had catch up shows so you could see what you'd missed 🤷🏻♂️
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Same here in Germany, but they weren't sleeping. People were watching because of all the trash whispering and waiting for the first touchy situations inter the covers.
They even had a time where one channel was broadcasting live nighttime. I think that stopped after a few seasons.
Those first seasons were pure trash, but so naive, compared to what it mutated to over the years.
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They jazzed it up with fake scenarios specially to boost ratings. Haven't you seen the movie? That was more of the point than just the fact he was being filmed. His life was all Hollywood bullshit. His own father was "killed off" when he was a kid, but the man didn't actually die.
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Bit of trivia I learned this week... The Truman Show house is Matt Gaetz' childhood home.
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Keep in mind his birth was live. They said by random chance in the film, but I suspect they induced labor and this was something like a post-Superbowl event that was hyped up.
So even if the show got boring, everyone would have been aware. So maybe you are just flipping through the channels (as was the style at the time), if the baby shows up you might watch for a few minutes just to see what it's up to.
Remember Reddit had that hotdog in gelatin? I'd want to check in on that every few months.
The first few years were probably inexpensive and eventually things would get interesting.
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Never saw a hot dog in gelatin, but there was one encased in resin
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Oh resin! That's what it was.
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I think the point was that there were also paid actors intentionally stirring up drama around him.
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Like, how much drama can they pull around a baby?
Especially if it is 24/7 for multiple years.
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Have you ever raised a baby? They're 90% drama, 10% sleep. Guaranteed the early days of the Truman Show were flooded with parents watching the actor mom struggle to deal with the constant crying. Crying because hungry, refusing to eat because they're too busy crying, crying because they're tired, but too busy crying to sleep. I bet tons of parents were watching it, commiserating, or judging, or arguing about how she should be doing this instead of that. The drama writes itself.
Not to mention the moments when they're being extremely cute. When they roll over in bed and stare wide eyed at a stuffed toy, then flail at it and coo little baby noises at it. Maybe bite on it and shake it around like a little puppy. People love that shit. If a live stream of a fixed camera in a car cafe can get millions of views, a live stream of a baby doing baby things can easily get lots of viewers.
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In the early years he would have been barely a prop. Things happen around him but not to him.
You watched Full House season 1, right?
Compare Canonical. Shuttleworth has apparently lost bags of money on his dream, for like decades by now, and apparently only last year or so showed a real profit, but kept on going. Same deal.
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Well there can be drama between the characters with the baby as the catalyst for the conflict.
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Just lock a bunch of writers into a room and don’t let them out until that baby is in peril.
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This would definitely get hella views on twitch just for the fact that its live 24/7
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I'm honestly not sure, I think it's actually been tried at this point. There's novelty there, at first, but it has to get boring after awhile. Most people just aren't that interesting, when you get down to it. Not on a constant 24/7 level.
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Being lightly scripted, drama would be easy to add:
Oh no, the mom put the baby on the counter near the stove with boiling water!
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Oh god, they foreshadowed the whole slew of YouTube channels based on kids and their parents.
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Marketing, and this movie came out during the Reality TV era, it was the peak commentary of where we were heading as a society if we stayed on the course we did. Wanting to know everything about someone’s life, start to finish.
(I’m saying that from both the POV of us watching it as well as the people watching from within the movie)
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hypothetically, there was also the literal world building around the kid. the enormous 'set' would have taken years to build. i can imagine a chunk of early broadcasting demonstrating the build and subsequent soap drama of all the actors to fill that void.
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I feel like this comment is ignoring a whole bunch of cat TikTok. Plus a whole bunch of grocery haul Youtube, for good measure.
I mean, canonically they aired a live birth and then just had a 24/7 babycam. I'd watch.
What I don't get is how they got through the 5-15 period, because there are plenty of real world parents that tune out for that already.
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The first couple of years were exclusive to OnlyFans and made huge sums of money from breast feeding fetishists. This financed them well into the toddler years.
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Have you (rhetorical you) seen the ridiculously boring and shallow shit that people watch nearly 24/7 now, though? Video platforms are filled with useless nonsense and people eat it up.
There are people who will have a show playing in the background every hour of the day, showing the "news" or soap operas or reality shows or game shows or movie reruns or etc etc, just soaking it up subconsciously forever until they die.
Go to any doctors office or bar or restaurant (in the US, anyway, maybe it's different elsewhere) and there's a high chance they'll also be playing some nonsense drivel on a dozen TVs strategically positioned so you can't sit anywhere in the place without being subjected to a view of one.
Society loves giving attention to the most inane shit available, even if just for background noise.
The idea of there being an audience for the early years of the Truman Show doesn't seem at all like an unfathomable stretch to me.
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Reaction videos are a popular format right now. People watch other people watch dumb TV. The Truman Show seems damned near brilliant compared to that.
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People have watched worse
