So the first aspect of this "new" realism is what I want to call the
"illusion of spontaneity."
There was a time when the tag "based on a true story" was a lure for viewers, but now that seems no longer enough; what viewers want is the true story itself.
What contemporary realism seems to demand is not only density of description, of space, of objects, in order convey verisimilitude, but also spontaneity of time, possibly because spatiality has become so hyper that time is seldom linear.
So the early realist emphasis on place and linear time or on exhaustive
texture in the film has shifted to an emphasis on globalized space and
synchronic time, and particularly unmediated time, spontaneity.
The illusion of spontaneity is required for television to appear live and therefore authentic.
Moreover, credibility fostered by immediacy is further structured by the dramatic
tension so germane to novelistic narrative, a dramatic tension that is
provided by accidents, revealing comments by participants.
The frisson of the unexpected, and
therefore the live, that these moments provide further fetishizes the
epistemological structures of conventional realist narrative; in other
words, consumers are programmed by the rhetoric of spontaneous spectacle,
the exceptional, and the individualism that underpins realism.
