"'This isn't real ... Oh, look, there's Canada'"

January 15, 2023 8:16 AM

Remember the time that Channel 4 sent some reality TV contestants to space for five days? Probably not, because they didn't, but they spent millions of pounds on tricking the contestants into thinking that they had. The resulting show, Space Cadets, is not fondly remembered -- or much remembered at all -- but a YouTube retrospective by science/culture vlogger Chris James has recently been making the rounds. It shows the highlights and the painstaking detail that went into the hoax, from embedded method improv actors to "spacecraft" constructed by Hollywood engineers. Whether it was a greater cruelty than I Wanna Marry Harry is a matter for debate.

(We all think we couldn't possibly be fooled by this kind of thing, but I sort of was once -- I was fooled enough to make a post about Mars One. I honestly don't remember whether I thought it could ever happen.)

posted by Countess Elena (17 comments total)

A 1g lift off courtesy of handwavium -- oh, right, like those poor schlubs aren't branded with a Circle Duh for life..
posted by y2karl at 8:49 AM on January 15, 2023

I remember when this was on TV, watched a few episodes. The way they selected the contestants was kindof interesting but ultimately the show was quite dull and had a strange vibe around it. Like it sounds interesting on paper but the result was not great, and while they tried to make it 'fair' on the contestants, it never quite felt right. A 5 min prank can be a good laugh for all involved if done right. A prank that lasts weeks and weeks is just strange for everyone involved.
posted by memebake at 9:47 AM on January 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

In "prank reality shows", one of the oddest examples in my mind was "The Joe Schmo Show" which was theoretically a reality show, but all the contestants except for one were actors, and everything they did was part of a calculated attempt coordinated among the entire staff to see how this one specific person would react to dramatic developments.

The part that never gelled for me, really, was exactly what the nature of the deception was supposed to be. It was sort of meant to be a kind of Truman Show-esque surprise for "Joe Schmo" to realize that this whole thing had been contrived around him, but reality shows are already far enough from reality that "this completely contrived scenario you would never mistake for the real world turns out to be all about you individually" doesn't pack quite the punch that "your world is a fake built entirely for your benefit" has. Basically, the big reveal was that something the dupe had thought was only about 85% artifice turned out to be more like 95% artifice.
posted by jackbishop at 11:34 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, there have been crueller TV shows – There’s Something About Miriam, The Swan or The X Factor’s carnivalesque “rejects” performances spring to mind

The Swan. Oh boy. This was a plastic surgery make-over show combined with a competitive beauty pageant. They kidnapped these women, told them they were ugly ducklings, had monsters draw on their body, then got to cutting. The women were forbidden from looking at a mirror for months until the night of the big reveal when it was decided if they were ready for the pageant. Then a panel of psychopaths judged which one was The Swan.

So, that happened. 2004.
posted by adept256 at 4:19 PM on January 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

I look forwards to a day when publishing prank content for profit is considered to be as legally and morally deplorable as revenge porn.
posted by CynicalKnight at 5:12 PM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

There was a recent post about The Joe Schmo Show, and this show came up in comparison as I recall.

The thing about The Joe Schmo Show was that it was supposed to be a months-long prank on this one guy, but mid-filming the cast and crew realised how utterly sociopathic it was and quickly changed tack to giving this guy a weird but cool experience. He did end up feeling kind of betrayed by it, because literally all of the relationships he'd formed over the course of filming were based on lies, but we're still talking about his story years later. You don't get to choose how you go down in history, but honestly, "such a decent guy he derailed a cruel stunt at his expense" is one of the better ones.
posted by Merus at 5:31 PM on January 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

There was a second season of Schmo…male and female contestants on a faux dating show. The weirdness was explained away by the producers explaining that the show’s format was very popular in Britain. The show was almost derailed when the female mark recognized one of the actors as a LA comedian. Third season was William Shatner filming a faux-terrible film in the Iowa town that Captain Kirk was supposed to be from.
posted by mmascolino at 9:05 PM on January 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I remember watching this at the time; it certainly felt like a ßcrewball comedy with the various 'almost true' training things. The moment on the "launch" when the paid actor who was acting as one of the trainees quietly said " I want ten thousand pounds (ish?) or I blow the whole gafffe" was a LOL moment.

But the moment that turned it from 'cringe prank' to 'holy hell this is evil' was the moment when they "opened the window blinds" to show the Earth underneath the spacecraft. At which point the joy, wonder, awe, and every other emotion that came through and that I felt along with them was a) utterly genuine and b) about to be ripped away in the cruellest possible way, and in public to boot.

Part of me still hopes that the whole show itself was a prank... but no.
posted by ewan at 2:17 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Y'all have reminded me of the Derren Brown: Apocalypse show (show? performance? stunt?) wherein he convinced a regular guy that he was living through a zombie apocalypse.

Said regular guy did not react at all like any other person I have ever questioned about what they would do in a zombie apocalypse - but then maybe that's the point, what we say we'd do and what we actually do.
posted by Molesome at 3:28 AM on January 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think reality tv probably needs a human research ethics board.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:17 AM on January 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think reality tv probably needs a human research ethics board.
Social Psychology has long list of well known experiments that were given the green light in the days before the arrival of those spoil-sports with all their "ethics reviews" (something TV seems to have largely escaped!)

Solomon Ash's conformity experiment - where everybody in a group gives a knowingly wrong answer - leaving just the subject who was not in the know.

Bibb Latane and John Darley show "Bystander apathy" - that cloud of smoke coming under the door of the interview room is a cause for alarm if you are alone there. Not so much if you are waiting with a group of complacent others.

The Milgram experiment - subjects are asked to give increasingly large (but not, secretly, real) electric shocks to another person when that person (an actor) gets a question wrong. The "scientist" merely says stuff like "the experiment must continue". How how will those shocks go?

Muzafer Sherif 's "Robber's Cave Experiment" - recruited 22 children and put them on a summer camp where they were subjected to all kinds of psychological manipulation

Jane Elliott's  "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise" - people are separated into groups according to their eye colour. They are then told some kind of bullshit about why one eye colour is superior to the other on whatever criteria. It takes about a day for "better" group to start to feel superior and the "worse" group to report feelings of insecurity.

Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prisoner Experiment. Subjects are randomly assigned to be "prisoners" or "guards". Things go far south fast.
posted by rongorongo at 6:21 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Social Psych is also riddled with unreproducible garbage studies that have profoundly damaged public discourse. Everyone knows reality shows are trash but many of those landmark postwar studies are as manipulated and compromised. The fundamental reason you don’t see similar results today is that they’re bad science, not IRBs.
posted by theclaw at 7:15 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

> The fundamental reason you don’t see similar results today is that they’re bad science, not IRBs.

Sure, but many of them wouldn't get past the ERB stage if proposed today. That said, yes, these were largely junk science and it's startling how often the Stanford Prison Experiment, in particular, is still cited uncritically in psychology textbooks.
posted by asnider at 8:27 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

There’s a non-trivial amount of willful blindness involved if you’re in a going-to-space reality show and there’s no liftoff acceleration or weightlessness.
posted by gottabefunky at 8:45 AM on January 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

There’s a non-trivial amount of willful blindness involved if you’re in a going-to-space reality show and there’s no liftoff acceleration or weightlessness.

That's actually somewhat explained in the Guardian article. Rather than idiots, they looked for "...what are known as susceptible people; people who are intelligent, have a creative mind, like practical jokes, and want to go along with people."

Couple that with: "A month-long immersion and propaganda campaign then began with lessons that would falsely explain one of the main lies of the project: there would be no zero gravity on their space mission, because they were going into 'near space,' rather than outer space."

Complete isolation from your regular friends, family and environment for a month, while being told all kinds of plausible sounding bullshit, is probably enough to convince the right kind of otherwise skeptical and intelligent person that they really were going to space even when the reality didn't match with what they would have initially expected prior to this propaganda campaign.
posted by asnider at 10:01 AM on January 16, 2023

My comment on the Joe Schmo thread goes double for this. I'm not nearly the space travel fanatic that I was when I was a kid, but I'd still jump at the chance--I even donated to St. Jude's Hospital for a chance to get in on that SpaceX thing--and I'd be beyond devastated to come out of the capsule to a studio audience; the only question would be how many times I could scream FUCK YOU before they dragged me off.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:12 PM on January 17, 2023

"The Joe Schmo Show" which was theoretically a reality show, but all the contestants except for one were actors, and everything they did was part of a calculated attempt coordinated among the entire staff to see how this one specific person would react to dramatic developments.

This reminds me of the climax of the "Yes or No" episode of Game Changer, where the host Sam Reich asks the contestants "Yes or No?" in a variety of increasingly theatrical ways, and they get points based on whether they answer "correctly". However, what they actually need to figure out is what the rule for determining a correct answer really is.. and Brennan Lee Mulligan's "I've solved your labyrinth, PUZZLE MASTER" rant is a thing of beauty and delight.

(honestly, just about every episode of Game Changer finds a way to crack me up, but this one in particular is Top Form)
posted by FatherDagon at 1:14 PM on January 18, 2023