Commentary

ControlTV Reality Show Crowd Sources a Life

Tristan-Couvares

Talk about audience empowerment. The recently launched experiment in hyper-interactive Web programing ControlTV is claiming 50,000 people a day are voting to determine the antics of Tristan Couvares as visitors control his life. Couvares has his life streamed 24/7 and then in a series of more sculpted episodes often sponsored by Ford, Mars Candy and Sprint. This is branded entertainment coproduced by Digital Broadcasting Group. Tristan drives a Ford, uses a Sprint phone and apparently eats a lot of candy bars. And as if 24/7 surveillance weren't enough, the poor bastard has his existence essentially crowd-sourced as people vote on what he is to do next. According to the show producers, so far Tristan's haircut, choice of pet and dates have been chosen by the audience. One episode attracted 170,000 votes.

And you know that the guy has been asked to do a host of stupid human tricks, from wearing a hot dog suit to writing a love song. And just in case you thought that the show wasn't sadistic enough, producers say that Tristan has also been seen vomiting after a sprint, surprised by a phone call from an ex-girlfriend, and threatening to quit the show. Given the relentlessness of the guy's humiliation and subjugation, you have to wonder what exactly it was it that made him want to quit ... only once.

The extreme reality show is being produced by Seth Green of Robot Chicken and Family Guy fame as well as Matthew Senreich, Richard Saperstein and DBG. The show premiered on October 6 with a planned six-week run. In its first two weeks online, ControlTV has served 3 million completed video views. The Web site is seeing average hang times of 25 minutes, but people are watching the recap episodes for about 80 seconds.

Who is this Tristan Couvares? The 25-year-old Web lab rat is a Connecticut transplant to LA who foundered in his first attempts to make it in the financial industry and took to the indie music scene. In Tristan, DBG definitely found their target demo. He is tall and fit, loves music and video games and finds himself in a twenty-something "quarter-life crisis" that the crowd is going to help him get through.

Tempting as it is to deride the premise and the level of surveillance the show imposes on this character, there is something about this entire enterprise that embodies the state of digital media in all of our lives and especially his generation's. After all, aren't many people starting to use the social network online as a kind of crowd-sourced advisory and surveillance mechanism? People are checking in with one another, giving and asking advice through their Facebook postings? For a generation of twenty-somethings that now famously have this attenuated decade of moving towards adulthood, the social network is serving as that surrogate adviser, the always-on second opinion. Now if only we could get Ford and Sprint to sponsor them.

 

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