Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!

Tv is run by schedules. With dozens of channels airing content 24/7, the schedules hold everything together. However, these schedules aren’t just for the tv stations to use, they also act as the schedules for the lives of the nation. Tv presents a schedule for the viewers who sit every night at 6pm to watch the news, the families who gather at 5:30pm to watch the game shows, or the teenager who leaves their room at 10:30 on a monday night to watch the latest episode of  dexter. Even for myself, my weeks are run by my television schedules. I know that Mondays is Amazing race and Once upon a time, Wednesdays are Supernatural, S.h.i.e.l.d and The Flash, Thursdays are Survivor and Arrow,  Fridays were Legend of Korra (the season just finished and wow it was awesome) and Saturdays are Saturday Night Live. But, being an Aussie, I don’t get these shows live on my tv and have to resort to sourcing them elsewhere and this often results in my viewing of my programs either later in the day or week than they were originally aired.

What we do have here however, in the great land Down Under, is an abundance of shows which push live events, must see reveals and spectacular performances. Yes, I’m talking about live television. Audiences love live tv and television producers love delivering it. However, live television isn’t just limited to watching watching people sleep or brush their teeth in real time on Big Brother, it covers talent performances and result shows (i.e X factor, House rules), major events (i.e Glasgow Commonwealth Games, political elections) or even programs as ordinary as breakfast tv or the news. It not only allows the average viewer at home to experience the extraordinary but it lets them feel that the ordinary can be a spectacle too.

An example of such a show is Sunrise, a breakfast show which airs live, every morning on Channel 7. Sunrise presents itself as a live to air show and goes out of it’s way to let it’s viewers know that it is in fact live. Examples of this, as can be seen in the image below, include the live time being consistently present on screen, the current temperature in each of the states also shown and a rolling ticker of news headlines given throughout the duration of the episode.Screen Shot 2014-08-25 at 10.31.44 pmHowever, it’s not just the graphics that contribute to Sunrise’s presentation of itself as a live program but various other elements at work as well, as can be seen in the excerpt here from a recent episode (5:33-11:25). Most obvious is the almost candid nature of the show, portraying a sort of ‘anything goes’ feel that one associates with the unpredictability of live television. The anchors can make mistakes (and often laugh about it too), the cameras or studio equipment can often be seen in shots, passersby in the street often stare in or wave through the rear window, even the language itself, with the anchors always welcoming back the viewers from the ad break, acknowledging that this is a television program that airs live with ads.

The idea behind these techniques is that rather than looking perfect, live tv is meant to appear immediate, it gives the viewers a chance to witness or be a part of something that they otherwise would not be able to without their television sets. The viewers want to feel included and the set up of the live program plays into that. This concept stems back to the idea of television as not only a family building unit but a nation building one. Television acts as a major factor in the creation of a social identity, the individual stations and producers want the entire nation watching their program and the best way to achieve this is to deliver their content live. The live event will bring the nation together and the viewer does not want to miss out on a potential spectacle. As a collective, television creates a national schedule, creating shared experiences for the entire public. Shows such as Sunrise use this, they present relatable content to their viewers and push the notion of ‘live’ to draw them in and create a linked audience across the nation.