Flipping through the channels often renders one’s brain into a gelatinous oozy substance, perfect for the aliens that are taking us over via Hulu. On one such surf-fest I happened across my least favorite channel, the Fox Reality channel. I hate reality shows. I do, I hate ‘em. Soul sucking succubi that bring out the worst in human nature, I don’t really enjoy watching people do each other in through conniving, backstabbing, lying, cheating and stealing. Sounds too much like the Bush administration.
One reality show I enjoyed was Stan Lee’s “Who Wants to Be a Superhero”. This was a show that rewarded the goodness in human nature and tried to bring out the best in people. So what if it had the budget of Romper Room, it made me feel all warm and glitzy inside and it featured the nicest guy in show business, Stan “the man” Lee.
So as I was channel surfing I crashed right into Fox Reality Channel where something caught my eye; a single person in a brightly colored octagonal room sitting on a bowling ball. I was immediately hypnotized. “What is this absurdity?” I thought. It turns out that it’s an original Fox Reality show called “Solitary”. The gimmick is this: people aren’t pitted against each other, they’re pitted against themselves.
Solitary is the thinking man’s reality show. Part SAW, part 2001: A Space Odyssey, part Portal. Aside from being thought provoking it also offers up plenty of grim and guilty pleasures
This is how it essentially works: 9 people are quarantined in their own personal pod. They’re food - and sleep - deprived. They are also made to undergo maddening and near torturous “treatments”, Like sitting on a bowling ball for an hour or having to smell the worst smells you can possibly imagine (such as “liquid ass”) or having to keep their tongue fixed to a plate of glass. Anyone can quit anytime they want to. All they have to do is push a big red button conveniently placed in their pod. The first one to push it gets kicked out of the game. As long as you don’t push the button first, you’re still in. Nobody knows how anyone else is doing during “treatments”. No one knows who has or hasn’t pushed the button. It’s a total mind screw. Now add to this mix a computer companion named “VAL” who’s voice is the only company any of the contestants have during their stay in Solitary. Part sadist, part confidante, and sometimes friend, a slightly less sinister version of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL, VAL is the game show host for the new millennium.
It’s fascinating to watch how people react when pushed to the limits of their physical and emotional endurance and it’s one of the most interesting pieces of television out there right now. It’s no surprise to me that it’s the most successful show in Fox Reality Channel’s history.
Solitary is also telling us that there are gigantic regions of possibility for reality television that have yet to be tapped. One of the people beginning to tap those regions is Lincoln Hiatt.
Lincoln is co-creator and executive producer of this psychotronic, human experiment. Before producing reality television for Fox he created stunning video displays for such high profile films as Independence Day and Godzilla, notably the opening credit sequence for the latter film.
I had a great time talking to Lincoln about what “Solitary” confinement is really like.
MANIA: What is Solitary really about to you? It’s so different from other reality shows. It really speaks to more to what makes people tick than just the “greed” element that you find in many other reality shows.
Lincoln Hiatt: “Val” talks about this being an experiment to test people mentally, physically, emotionally; an opportunity to push themselves farther than they ever have before. And the trick of it is, the thing that flips it around from being an ordinary reality show, the kind of reality show that I really want to watch and do…is…If Big Brother is a group of people eating away at each other over the course of multiple weeks until there’s one left and that person wins, well ok, then can you do a competition where nobody meets? That was a big question for me and absurdly we decided that we could. The audience loves this idea that…The BS of a house show, the backstabbing, switching alliances…people love alliances, they love survivor but forget all of that, can you have a reality show if no one gets to relate to anybody else? If it’s just you and you? How far do you push yourself in the absence of information? How far do you push yourself in a competition with other people if you have no idea on earth how anyone else is doing? And by the way, the benevolent bitch that’s talking to you 24/7 is sometimes misleading you on purpose and you know it but you can’t tell when so you never know what to believe!
MANIA: On a couple of recent episodes there’s a point where the contestant decides to push the big red button (the “quit” button). It’s a total mind screw. They say that they’re sure that someone else must have already hit the button but…it reminds me of poker, where you decide that someone else is bluffing or in this case that someone else has quit before you have. You’re ready at that point to push all your chips in and your making what amounts to a fifty thousand dollar bet.
LH: The consequence of that gamble and that lack of information is...people push themselves on Solitary harder, I believe, than on any other show. In the absence of information they really do explore their own limits. In their heart of hearts they don’t believe that anyone else is quitting. The risk is so high of quitting early and you feel like such a dork if you do it and lo and behold…the model in episode two of season three that quit after 14 flesh pins, when she found out that everyone else went to the full forty five pins, when she found out afterwards, she said “oh my God, how lame was I?,” and consequently when some of the others found out that someone had quit thirty pieces of pain ago, that messes with their heads too!
LH: And some of them will do it anyway; they completely believe the idea that this is about testing themselves, as far as they can go. At some point, of course, everyone will consider how they’re doing against everyone else but some of them are so devoted to the experiment itself that they don’t really care how it relates to anybody else.
MANIA: I would imagine that’s true for the guy on the third season that’s just a hard core fan of the show, who built his own pod in his living room to prepare him for this.
LH: Rob Rob is a really good kind of insane, he’s emblematic of our contestants for a particular reason. One of the things that I think drives people on reality show and maybe our show in particular is that in the enormously oversaturated multi-media world. With all of our technology, with texting and email, it’s Blade Runner. Billboards are now moving and light up. There are Coke machines that talk to you! All this fiction has become fact. In the same way that a lot of Gene Roddenberry’s fiction became fact in the 80’s, Philip Dick has dreamed up a lot of fiction that has become reality in this era. As a result of all this techno noise that we are absorbed in as well as buried by at the same time it’s impossible to be noticed or it’s nearly impossible to be that one Who in Whoville who’s yelp is heard above the din. And I think we all have this need for the cosmic yelp. Everybody wants to be heard. And one way to finally be heard is by being on a reality show. It’s not about fame; it’s about that primal cry of “I exist”.
MANIA: Which I think is why posting videos on YouTube is so gigantic.
LH: Honestly, that’s how I think of it! And I think Solitary is even more a significant satisfier of that need because people are alone in their cause.
MANIA: You’re also cutting them off from all of those things you were just discussing, cell phones, the internet, TV, their mp3 players AND contact with other human beings. And with technology you tend not to notice you’re plugged in until you become unplugged.
LH: I think part of the consequence of being plugged in and the phenomena of MySpace, Facebook, blogging, YouTube, I think there are a lot of people talking but not a lot of people saying anything.
MANIA So, one thing I’ve been wondering is how do you make sure no one gets hurt doing any of these challenges?
LH: We test everything and I test most things on myself. I have a long history of doing challenge shows of some kind so I’ve always used myself as a guinea pig. I may have graduated to the point where for season 4 I’ll pay somebody else to suffer (laughter). I want to know what that experience is like so if I don’t do it to myself I make sure other people do it to extremes. And that’s a requirement for developing challenges for the show. The goal isn’t to hurt anybody. Someone might get a bruise but no one’s going to get their lung eviscerated. It’s also essential that we do things that the contestant can get themselves into as well as get themselves out of.
MANIA: How do you come up with the ideas for treatments?
LH: I draw on my bag of odd pop culture references and I draw on what annoys me. Our tests are the immunity challenges. If you win a test you don’t have to do the treatment. The treatments are our elimination challenge. Our eliminations run differently. There’s no tribal council or no vote. A treatment is designed to make you quit. When you’ve reached your limit you quit. If you’re the first to quit (in a treatment) you go home. That’s a really dastardly head game if you stop to think about how that works.
MANIA: That’s basically the crux of the show
LH: It is, It is. You can be the second one to quit for nine episodes and win the game. As long as you can outlast one person, you’re in, which is also the insult and injury part of it.
MANIA: Right! Part of the insult is “I didn’t have to suffer this long? I suffered through this nightmare an hour longer than I needed to?”
LH: And some people say “I’m glad I did, I promised I would last the entire treatment”
Maureen this year, who’s this 97 pound ex news reporter is as big as a drop of water. She’s pretty and petite and feminine and you think “this girl’s not going to last” and she blew everyone away. The only thing that defeated her was her stomach.
MANIA: Right, something that you can’t really control.
LH: We do our absolute best to cast people who will participate in the experiment, who will give themselves over to it. Those are the people who enjoy it the most and those are the people you most want to watch. But there’s no way I can handicap any of these seasons and tell you who’s going to win.
Solitary tells us that there are gigantic regions of possibility for reality television that have yet to be tapped. One of the people beginning to tap those regions is Lincoln Hiatt.
Lincoln is co-creator and executive producer of this psychotronic, human experiment. Before producing reality television for Fox he created stunning video displays for such high profile films as Independence Day and Godzilla, notably the opening credit sequence for the latter film.
MANIA: So where did you come up with the idea for Solitary?
LH: The original idea was that I wanted to go to the salt flats and dig ten underground chambers. An underground chamber consisted of a cot, a toilet a meal slot and a ladder to go to the surface where there was this seal, almost like a submarine hatch. And then one wall was going to be all glass with an operator behind it that you couldn’t see, in a separate chamber. Everything was going to be heat and cool controlled through a ventilation system that rose above ground but the only thing you saw above ground was something that looked like a giant tombstone. And I wanted even to just put the contestants first names on it. There’s an old legend that if there’s a tombstone with just a first name on it you’re supposed to walk around it and repeat the persons name over and over and they’ll appear. So the initial idea was you bury all these people and you take a year to shoot it and there was no gaming except on some sort of off kilter schedule you allow them to climb the shaft to the top and to walk around in a little pen in front of their grave marker. And over this half mile row they could see all the other grave markers and most of the time they wouldn’t see anyone else there but sometimes in the distance they could see another contestant walking around their grave marker. The game was that anyone could quit at anytime and the last one left was the winner. So that was the initial concept and then it was “well, how do we turn this into a reality?” So, ok, we can’t afford 365 days of shooting, constraints of production and concepts, they all kind of push and pull. And we came up with a scheme of rather than wait people out, we had to drive people out.
MANIA: I think it’s ingenious how you use I’m going to guess is a relatively small budget to serve the higher purpose of the show. It all works wonderfully together.
LH: It all ends up working. We’re very proud of it. Andrew Golder is a very good producer and a great partner on it; we’ve been working together for around 15 years. Fox Reality came to us and said “give us a show that no one else will produce. We want a show that no one else will make.” Great! We’ve got just the thing!
MANIA: What was the perception of the show before you actually made it?
LH: Before we made it, it was scary as hell but the basic security measure is…solitary confinement can be really damaging but it’s basically a garbage in/garbage out scenario. If you’re broken going into it you’re not going to come out of it any better and if you’re well you’re not really going to come out of it any worse. We screen people rigorously. We do our best to find people who are really well integrated; the more integrated they are, the less likely they are to dis-integrate.
MANIA: Do you often find yourself thinking a possible contestant would be great but there’s just a couple of things that seem off; so you decide against using them?
LH: We have a ranking system and there are a handful of experts in the business that we use. The psych analyses and the test that we do is as rigorous as we can make it but it’s not foolproof. The person you think might be a risk is not a risk and the person that you think is completely stable might be the one you really have to watch.
MANIA: As a psych major I just think that’s so fascinating. It must be really exciting at the beginning of a season to hit the “start” button and just see what happens.
LH: We’re talking about season four now and God-willing, we’ll do it. The ratings are great now, it’s the best thing Fox Reality has on the air, it’s what makes people come back to that channel
MANIA: I personally hate reality shows. I think they’re incredibly mean spirited. They pit people against each other in an almost animalistic way and really bring out the worst in human nature but when I came across Solitary, I found it to be really different in that respect. It’s not about lying, cheating and stealing your way to victory which is really what’s been going on with the country as a whole.
LH: I don’t begrudge any of those shows their success. If it’s getting an audience it’s satisfying a need but there have been about 30 years of Regan era thinking in this country but now there’s a shift, a change of epoch. This Obama election; grass-roots, yes we can, we don’t like the status quo. That status quo being the utter and desperate collapse of the financial system and the housing market and Gordon Gekko as a character saying “Greed Is Good”, well Gordon was wrong! And Allan Greenspan as a real life “kneel down at their feet” guru/expert on how to run financial markets and how a de-regulated financial market, which is basically governed and organized by the Gordon Gekko-like creed and now with all this mess he comes out and he says “oops! I guess I was wrong”. It was this funny, faint, horribly disturbing mea culpa. Essentially “I was wrong about human nature and its effect on the financial markets. He thought that greed would self-regulate. He sold the Kool-Aid! If you can distance yourself from the crises it’s fascinating and funny as hell. But I agree with you, I think it’s time for a shift away from the bloody mind mess of the other shows. It can continue, I don’t care, make another eight seasons of Survivor or Big Brother. If you’ve got an audience then great but there’s room now for something that’s a complete turn-around from that. Now my biggest challenge is getting people to get that. Every buyer, they hear me but they’ve been conditioned to think that a reality show is one particular thing.
MANIA: Really?! It seems so obvious. What those shows like Survivor did was to say “here’s a new kind of show, a new format and then what Solitary does is to say “That’s only the tip of the iceberg, we haven’t even begun to fully tap what can be done here. That, to me, is why I got excited about Solitary.
LH: Generally speaking, people really do want to make something new and different. It’s just that they don’t want to put their jobs on the line for it, and I understand that.
MANIA: I agree. That’s really the thing with corporate entertainment thinking. A failure can cost you your job so you do what you think has the best chance of success which leads to just copying something that’s already been successful.
LH: We tend to repeat the actions that are rewarded and to not repeat the actions that are not rewarded but the trick is in discerning what the reward is. The incentive and the reward are not always obvious. I think you’re right about this being a fear based culture. A lot of people are motivated by, make their decisions based on fear and if you can elect not to do that. If you can separate yourself from your fear, we’re all afraid, everybody has that but if you can not make your decisions based on fear then you will find success.
MANIA: Doesn’t the fact that it’s the most successful show in Fox Reality’s history…doesn’t that encourage people? Make them think “hey, they’re doing something different and it’s working!”
LH: Yeah, People are willing to listen now. I can get an audience now; it’s just hard getting them to trust it will work (laughter). Speaking of trust, all the credit in the world to Fox Reality – David Lyle (runs Fox Reality), Bob Bowden and Noel Siegel who understand it and were willing to take a chance with it and stay with it.
MANIA: I have to ask you about a particular treatment. The smelling treatment. That was amazing. I had to turn the sound down (Lincoln laughs heartily) because the sound of people gagging and heaving almost made me sick too!
LH: Then we did our work!
MANIA: How did you create those scents?
LH: That’s a secret I can’t betray but I will tell you they were horrible. The funny thing is, we’re trying to figure out what’s going to drive people to quit. We had one guy put on the face mask, smelling “liquid ass” who nearly threw up into the facemask and then I tried and thought “well, I guess I’ve changed too many diapers in the last couple of years! This isn’t nice but it’s what I breathe all day”. Everyone’s looking at me like I was sick in the head. I get liquid ass a couple of times a day! It’s called the baby’s sick or the babies’ needs their diapers changed!
MANIA: I’m also really interested in the idea of creating challenges to get people to quit; trying to force them out. It seems like a difficult line to walk between making someone sick to their stomach and cutting their fingers off. Because let’s say the challenge isn’t strong enough and people don’t quit and you’re in week one hundred and no one’s quitting!
LH: It’s risky. That is risky. In the first season we had a challenge that I loved and made a great act of TV but nobody quit. It was called Sonic Assault and we bombarded the contestants with these awful sounds; dentist drills, jack hammers, sirens but no one quit. But just around the time of that episode we had a contestant quit over absolutely nothing. We had a contestant named Cliff and because he quit because we didn’t give him his Chapstick. He melted down in Solitary. When we first put him in the cast we all thought he would win. He was young and fit and a really proud and aggressive male. He called himself a stuntman; he had been to stunt school; he lit himself on fire! And he quit because he didn’t like the way his new “mommy”, Val, was talking to him! She wouldn’t give him his Chapstick!
MANIA: That’s amazing.
LH: Our season one winner was English teacher from Fairfax High School. This slight guy; we didn’t anticipate to win.
MANIA: What do you want to do with season 4?
LH: I can’t really reveal it. I have a really interesting, head game, diabolical twisted minded thing for the contestants.
MANIA: Do you find yourself thinking “we’ve been doing this for three seasons, what else can we do?”
LH: The goal is to create something that is familiar. So the audience can relate to it. That often figures into it. Something that you either have experience with, that you know is annoying as hell or you can tell it’s annoying as hell. What we’re trying to get to, regardless of what the activity is, is the rawest, truest expression of self. What I wanna see isn’t the most amazing gag or stunt in the world. I want to see people truly reveal themselves. I want to see their highest highs, their lowest lows, their deepest confessions and their greatest epiphanies. And we get those things out of people in Solitary.
MANIA: I want to talk to you about the lack of sleep the contestants go through. That’s a really difficult thing to endure. No sleep.
LH: The contestants suffer in a way in Solitary. They suffer as long as they want to.
MANIA: Right. You’re not asking them to put their hands into a box of razor blades.
LH: In a way, you could! No one’s required to do it!
MANIA: That’s true but if you put a diamond at the bottom of a box of razor blades, in a way you’d be taking advantage of people’s…It’s unbelievable what some people will do for money.
LH: The other reality is that if you did do that some of your contestants would think it was a trick and that the razor blades won’t really cut. They put a certain amount of trust that you won’t really hurt them, which is true.
MANIA: Not that I would want to watch people put their hands into a box full of razor blades. (Laughter)