I was not fortunate enough to catch the building-side broadcast of HBO Voyeur, which is a shame, because it seems the only appropriate venue for the undertaking. The much ballyhooed project is basically an ambiguous commercial for the network – a four-minute looped reel of the sensational/mundane events that transpire one night in the stairwell and eight apartments of a lower Manhattan building. It serves as a reminder to us all that that drama can happen anywhere, but it’s an effing guarantee on HBO.
Voyeur is an exciting idea. Aside from the fly-on-wall kicks of seeing people fight and make out, there’s also real estate scoping, a favorite pastime of city-dwellers everywhere. Seeing it broadcast on vacant walls or billboards would be an experience, but watching the same events compartmentalized on HBO On Demand or in poor resolution on the website is just boring.
It’s also BS. Most of this stuff would never happen, and the suggestion that it’s all happening at the same moment, in the same building, is funnier than it is intriguing. HBO’s big ploy is to appeal to our lust for real, accessible drama, but what they’ve given us is comically overdone. I have a friend whose old neighbor did nude calisthenics while he waited for his popcorn to microwave. He could have had his own show.
[...] In the past, I have mocked television shows (er.. network marketing folks) for their futile insistence to incorporate online and viral elements into their television show. Most recently HBO’s Voyeur seemed like a novel idea, but then the actual manifestation was too fuzzy to see and they started peddling t-shirts at their flagship on Sixth Avenue. Stupid internet tricks will almost never widen a show’s audience; they merely make PR folks feel a sense of Oregon Trail-esque accomplishment. Finishing a viral marketing campaign, without catching cholera or loosing all your oxen, is as much of an accomplishment as you can hope for. [...]