Wednesday's Downtown: How television maintains its attraction nowadays?

With the popularity of the Internet and smartphones, youngsters watch less television. In Japan, there is a word called “テレビ離れ” which means Japanese youngsters are lack interest in watching TV shows. Rather than watching TV, they more tend to use video sharing sites like YouTube. However, the influence of television still cannot be replaced by other media. Those popular TV shows can be a news article on the internet quickly. Wednesday’ Downtown is one of the popular variety shows in Japan and it is popular because of the interaction between production group and their audience.

(Figure 1: Logo of Wednesday's Downtown. Retrieved 26 Feb 2021, from https://www.tbs.co.jp/suiyobinodowntown/)

Wednesday's Downtown has been terrestrial broadcast since 2014. In each episode, a comedian is invited to present a theory to the panellists' group, which is grouped by other comedians and television personalities. All the theories are tested by the production group and record as a video. Those cast members need to give some reactions and comments to the videos. Most of the theories are trivial information that nobody would research. Pranks and challenges also are produced in these shows. For example, “There are people who live in Naha city that cannot write Naha in Japanese kanji properly.”, “No matter how the prank ridiculous is, a professional comedian will comply with it.” and “Could people leave a room without any clocks after exactly 24 hours passed?”.

The interaction between the show and its audience is the main reason to make the audience keep watching. The production group makes the most of the social media to spread out the message and let the audience to join into the shows. In some projects, a vote will behold, and the actions will depend on the side that the majority of the audience have chosen. Thus, the audience can get satisfaction through participating in it.

However, if not keep a distance, troubles will happen. In fact, Wednesday's Downtown got in trouble a few times when they were testing theory and police were called to solve the problem. A theory test was stopped during the experiment since it brought troubles to the public. Kuro-chan is a Japanese comedian with a low favorability. In this banned theory, Kuro-chan was trapped in a room. The only thing that he could do was using Twitter to spread out his situation and wait for someone to help him. In this process, many participants found the wrong place and around ten people gathered in front of an unrelated apartment. Thus, the inconvenience was caused to the general public who are not related due to the misinformation on the internet. Although this theory brought trouble to the public, there is no doubt that the project was creative and entertaining.

(Figure 2: Finding help to save Kuro-chan from the official Twitter of Wednesday's Downtown. Retrieved 26 Feb 2021, from https://www.j-cast.com/2016/06/01268514.html?p=all)

In my opinion, television provides entertainment to audiences, so people can take the shows as a topic in daily conversation with their friends and family. Even though the youngsters watch less TV, the TV shows production group still can use the Internet to remake connection with youngsters. Besides, since television still has a great influence, each popular show can become net articles and attract people to discuss it. In other words, television needs to use the Internet better in order to maintain its influence on society.

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Reference:

J-CAST NEWS. (2016). TBS「クロちゃん」救出番組で警察出動　ツイッターで「誤情報」広がり、中止決定. J-CAST NEWS. [Online] Available at: https://www.j-cast.com/2016/06/01268514.html?p=all [Accessed: 26 Feb. 2021].