Romantic TV Shows

Interview one

In the first interview, I interviewed a teenage boy. His three favorite romantic TV shows were “How I met your mother,” Gilmore Girls,” and “Nashville.” He suggested that the TV shows had balanced suspense, the characters were funny and acted as the audience, and the amount of tension and conflict in the shows impressed him. On the contrary, he stated that he disliked the TV show “Surface” season 1 saying that it had a poor set up. According to him, romantic TV shows have helped him improve how he approaches ladies and how to become a gentleman. Moreover, the films had given him the confidence to approach ladies that he believed were beyond his class. He stated that he admired heroic characters who went for a higher target, for example, a poor gentleman dating a girl from an influential family. He, however, believes that Hollywood is centered around too much love stories to the extent that they are missing on some physical activity.

Interview two

The second interview was with a teenage lady whose favorite TV shows included “Poldark,” “Sorry for your loss,” and “The good wife.” She stated that the movies had a perfect and free-flowing storyline, the characters acted like the audience, which made it easy to relate with the shows, and they had characters with believable dialogue. Conversely, she disliked “Criminal minds,” stating that it lacked much tension. According to her, watching romantic TV shows have made her understand men better and can tell men who date her with good intentions and those with ill intentions. Moreover, romantic TV shows have made her more defensive as she believes many men date women and later abuse women’s emotions. She looks for TV shows with themes like conflicts, financial differences, powerful women, and romance too. She wishes that romantic movies should have stories of couples who come from poor backgrounds and who struggle to riches together and not the typical storylines of one party being rich while the other is poor.

Interview three

The third interviewee was a mother in her late forties. She liked the movies “parenthood” “Gilmore Girls” and “Nashville.” She claimed that she could easily relate to the films and that they contained enough suspense, which motivated her to want to watch every next episode. On the contrary, she dislikes TV shows like “Desperate housewives” which she claimed had too much unrealistic drama. Watching romantic TV shows had influenced how she related to her teenage children as she could understand their situation and place herself in the situation before talking to them whenever they had issues regarding relationships.  She wishes to find more TV shows with themes relating to empowering women. She likes female characters who are outgoing and who are strong economically and emotionally. She believes that most TV shows overlook the aspect of women empowerment and thus portray them as dependants of the male character and therefore affect the beliefs of young girls who grow up believing that women should depend on men for their needs.  

Similarities and Differences

The three individuals liked romantic TV shows that had heroic characters, characters whom they could relate to, and with less exaggeration. Besides, they all wished for storylines with much suspense. They also seemed to dislike romantic TV shows where it was easy to guess the villain of the story, characters who offered stereotypical jokes, and stories that made dating look depressing.  On the contrary, the boy liked TV shows with heroes in physical activities while the ladies seemed to like heroes in being gentlemen. Moreover, unlike the boy, the ladies loved TV shows with storylines with less violence and with sympathetic characters (Gökçearslan, 2010). However, they all liked TV shows whose storylines touched on the aspect of a family as the central theme.

My pitch

I would create a TV show whose main characters would be a gentleman and a blind lady who is in love and whose families are against the relationship. The two will travel to a small town where they will struggle against all the odds, including family condemnation and poverty. In the process, they would break up severally before settling together and returning home a married couple with children having accomplished their education successful. In the end, the gentleman would be a successful businessman while the lady will be excelling in her career as a representative of individuals with special needs. The characters to play them will be a medium-sized man but who is willing to physically challenge anyone willing to interfere with the relationship. The lady will be a young lady who will act like a blind person. 

I will pitch the TV show idea to Netflix since the company has a huge subscriber base and the procedure of getting the movie on Netflix is less complicated (Potter, 2018). I learned that viewers like TV shows which introduce the main characters and show how they met.  The characters should also look, speak, and act as the target audience to allow the audience to relate (Tran et al., 2015). Moreover, viewers like an interesting plot with characters having targets that they have to face obstacles and conflicts before achieving. Viewers also like TV shows with believable dialogue and a predictable structure which should entail the movie ending with all characters back to the status quo.

References

Gökçearslan, A. (2010). The effect of cartoon movies on children’s gender development. Procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 2(2), 5202-5207.

Potter, A. (2018). Creating Children’s Television for SVODs: The Alignment of Global Production Practices with National Screen Policies in the Netflix Original Bottersnikes and Gumbles. Media Industries Journal, 5(2).Tran, D., Bourdev, L., Fergus, R., Torresani, L., & Paluri, M. (2015). Learning spatiotemporal features with 3d convolutional networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision (pp. 4489-4497).