Discovery Channel: Making Safe Decisions

          After spending only a couple hours watching the Discovery channel, it was easy to tell that a lot has changed in reality television on this specific network. Shows used to typically be documentary style episodes that were mostly educational in nature. Now, though, I noticed that a lot of things had changed. The shows were all still based off of real situations, but in the couple hours I watched it didn't seem like any of the shows were not staged. In other words it seemed that all of the shows were completely staged. In particular I found the show Bering Sea Gold interesting because it came on directly after the show Gold Rush. Gold Rush was a fairly appealing show, but Bering Sea Gold seemed completely over dramatized. My main question was how this show could be successful even though it was blatantly over dramatic. In the Marxism section of Critical Media Studies, Brian Ott and Robert Mack state, “the most fundamental rule of the profit-motive is nothing succeeds like success.” This concept parallels with the changes in television that were noticed on the Discovery channel because creating overly dramatic reality was threaded through many other shows also. The logic of safety uncovers how media conglomerates will recycle generic formulas of media texts including subjects and characters in order to ensure financial success. Discovery was not even attempting to alter almost anything between the two shows other than the location of the characters. Both shows utilize a competition style gold mining scenario where different teams of miners attempt to find the most gold by the end of the season. A major difference was in the danger that the divers in the Bering Sea had to face in order to mine, and this may be where the show has its most interesting subject matter. Other than these differences attempting to alter the scenarios of Gold Rush, Bering Sea Gold is nothing more than a simple spin off of the former. This type of blatant reproduction is another method that large television companies like Discovery use in order to produce massive profits. Mack and Ott use shows like Law and Order and CSI as examples of how the television industry uses the logic of safety in order, yet there are countless examples of this occurrence on the Discovery channel alone. For example, the shows about gold mining have been highlighted here, but there are even shows about loggers that use the same competition style reality show. The diversity of television is being lessened all the time as a result of the logic of safety, and it will continue to make more money for television conglomerates  because of how easy it is to create spin offs that will be successful.