How The Shire is fixing Australian TV

During my travels in Finland, I found myself keeping up to date with everything I could via Twitter and News.com.au. Mainly because I don't speak Finnish, the news was easier to swallow and a lot easier to read on my phone or laptop but my favourite international news experience was when The Shire was trending for the full six hours I was in Tampere.

Yes, I know with sites like this, I shouldn't have been on Twitter and enjoying my holiday.

It originally started when I arrived and found a quick Wi-Fi spot whilst waiting to be served for train tickets and it ended when I checked into an American Steakhouse shortly before heading to Helsinki. Despite the fact I had thought the show was cancelled indefinitely due to the negative backlash of both, the community it was portraying and from entertainment critics alike, The Shire seemed to continue like a Rhinoceros with a head injury.

The Blind Side is da best movei evaraaaar!!!!!1111!?#1!

However, the initial reaction was incredibly negative on both Twitter and Facebook, which made me believe that there may be humanity left in the TV viewing population. At the time of the original airing, I checked Facebook to see two of my friends liking a Facebook post along the lines of "Getting this fuckin shit of my telly", which had a total of over a thousand thumbs up. Actually looking at the official Facebook page for The Shire, there are over fifty thousand people talking about it, but less than ten thousand actually like the show.

I'm sure more people like Question Time than The Shire

The first series of articles seemed to come across in only a negative light but a few more people have been opening up to the show in the past forty eight hours. I finally got to watch an episode and whilst I missed the pilot, I don't think I missed much. To sum up the show, I've never seen such a pure and more concentrated form of vapidity and mediocrity in my life. The amount of skewed morals, meanings and mentoring which takes place in a single episode, is not only frustrating but also inspiring.

Dude, she'd be hawt with Botox

The show's style is not your typical reality show, as the camera switches between carefully prepared situational shots and one on one interviews. For those who initially compared the show to that of MTV's Jersey Shore or the UK's The Only Way is Essex, the similarities could stop from minute one. The show is more akin to Home and Away and it's melodramatic style of storytelling and it's simplistic storylines keeps it in the running for a soap opera category, over light or reality entertainment.

...because there is no unintentional comedy category.

But before I get into why the show is inspiring for aspirational TV writers and TV critics, I will mention the people to blame, Shine Australia. They'd had runaway successes in the last half a decade with shows such as the Australian adaptations of The Voice and The Biggest Loser and The Shire seems like one of their first pieces of original programming, despite the similarities to other formats. I think Shine has made good products in the past and probably at the time of the first unveiling of The Shire, they'd already sunk too much money into it to not run it, but I do wonder how the pitch for that show went down.

So the monkeys are...outside the zoo?

Actually oddly enough if you go to Shine Australia official website, there is not a single mention of The Shire whatsoever. And this is where things get interesting. It seems like everyone wants to distance themselves from the show, excluding the stars. I say stars, but they're more like burnt out lights on a Christmas tree, trying to flicker and stay on, but eventually will be trashed or broken before the week is through. The online reaction is incredibly negative, but it's not just from critics like it usually is, it's from the generation and people who the show is meant to be connecting with and that's what is so positive.

...okay, not that positive.

We've seen the nature of where celebutants like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian end up with their famously  TV abbreviated lives and I think Australian audiences, both young and old are not having a bite of it. Taking a look at a great article by TV critic Michael Idato, recaps the show but also let's us in on the ratings for The Shire. He states in an audio recording that the show debuted last week with a pretty nifty amount of people, close to a million and this week, the ratings dropped significantly after people turned over after Masterchef. The show garnered 1.5 million initially, but then things got really bad when the true figures were to be revealed around 750 000.

Which means, more people have seen this than The Shire...which is great.

This is showing a great sliding progression that hopefully will not pick up next week. This is apart of an everchanging cycle of television as we have to remember that Jersey Shore has been running for almost four years and has even spawned a spinoff, The Shire would be lucky to have an episode five. I think the show has more relations to the idiotically popular The Hills, in both style and substance. The Hills ran for six seasons and often focused on the lives of their characters in more of a plot-driven style rather than, let's wait and see who falls over drunkenly first.

Artist Rendering of their Facebook page

Either way, Australian audiences are turning off The Shire and Idato mentions that Australia isn't used to this "soft script" style. I also think the audience it was aimed at was a bit too media savvy to not know when they were being fed something that clearly was not a reality show, at least not in style. Another great article from writer Helen Razer pointed out, regarding the show's backlash that it was "easy to call it 'shallow'...'stupid..." and making fun of "so-called 'bogan'", but the fact remains that "being a snob about The Shire and the people it purports to represent is win-win for critics: it requires no intellectual strain AND it makes us seem especially clever." It makes us feel good to hate this show and that I was initially afraid that people may be hate-watching and hate-tweeting, but with such a drop, I think that the future of Australian TV really is in the hands of the people.

This is why we can't have nice things...

With everything said and done, The Shire did end up 7th on last night's ratings and was sadly probably watched, tweeted and hated a lot more than rank number 19, Q and A. Australian TV isn't bad, it can get better, we just need to watch less of this and more of other things...or someone from TV Land needs to contact me. I got a great pitch about a monkey who spends thirteen weeks living with a typical dysfunctional Australian family.

You can follow me on Twitter and we can talk about The Shire too.