Amateur Power

Novices Steal the Show As Television Plays Who Wants to Be a Star

"What is this, amateur night?!"

Once upon another time, that was the ultimate insult -- as when bellowed by a bombastic director at performers rehearsing a play sloppily in the classic movie musical "42nd Street." But the slur has lost its punch. Any given evening, on any broadcast or cable network, could be amateur night now, and suffer no more for it than high ratings and crowds of commercials.

Television has been invaded by, and perhaps risks being overrun with, ordinary folk who have seeped through the screen much as Alice smushed through the looking glass. Amateurs are pouring in from right next door, down the street or upstairs in one of the kids' rooms. Amateur nights turn into amateur weeks, amateur months, amateur years -- maybe an amateur decade is but the beginning of the first Amateur Century.

It's topsy-turvy time: The audience is the show, the show is the audience ("the audience" meaning "the viewer" -- although on such programs as "The Jerry Springer Show" and "Oprah," studio audiences participate to the point of performing). The invaders are not commonly called "amateurs"; nor are they called "civilians," a traditionally derisive term used by people in show business when referring to those who aren't. Here we call them amateurs for the sake of convenience, but like all lines in TV, the one between amateur and professional gets blurrier all the time.

In an age when TV cameras are nearly as commonly owned as TV sets -- and when amateur auteurs at home produce films that are uplinked to millions of screens, a la YouTube -- being on television is no longer such a big deal. (It's certainly not the intimidating ordeal it was decades ago when Jackie Gleason's petrified Ralph Kramden on "The Honeymooners" stammered "hommina hommina hommina" on a quiz show.)

Indeed, contestants on this summer's game shows "Singing Bee" (returning in the fall) and "Don't Forget the Lyrics" were bubbling over with bravado, bouncing and flouncing with seemingly uncontainable glee, appearing to be as comfy on-camera as at home on-couch.

Professional actors couldn't have simulated infectious cheerfulness any more credibly. On reality TV, real people have mastered the art of faking it. They learned by watching years of old-fashioned television dominated by professional actors. Now, more and more shows are ballyhooed as being "unscripted" and performed by non-pros. It's the blogging, the blogification, of television, and it naturally has roots in the Internet the way so many things do.

Stars of the Internet somehow retain their amateur standing -- and credibility not granted to most professionials working at big-time TV networks -- until that bittersweet moment when a network looks down, sees their work and plucks it up for dissemination via airwaves, satellites or cable's cables. The Web can have a strangely authenticating effect, such as when Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake created a hilarious video that aired on "Saturday Night Live" but only became a bona fide sensation when the uncensored version was all over YouTube, bleeped words restored.

Amateurs have long been represented on television. A half-century ago, viewers could also watch "Ted Mack's Amateur Hour," a talent competition not entirely unlike today's megahit "American Idol," or watch the ancient ancestors of "America's Got Talent." Where amateurs were once the proverbial trickle, they are now the perpetual flood.

They don't have to be aspiring singers or dancers. They can just be people playing themselves, or hyped and phonied-up versions of themselves, on any of TV's so-called reality shows. "Survivor" jet-propelled the trend, conveniently enough at the start of the century, in 2000, although MTV's "Real World" and a few other reality shows preceded it. "Survivor" proved the genre could work not just on MTV but on CBS, a big-time mainstream network.

For broadcast networks, the switch to reality programming means lower production costs and higher profit margins per show, to help make up for the overall plummet in viewership (many viewers having migrated to basic cable). It adds up to a massive trend toward downsizing.

Just who is an amateur these days? It isn't so clear anymore.