Reality TV, of course, has about as much connection to actual reality as Court TV has to the reign of Louis VIX. I don't know about you, but a typical day for me is more likely to be dominated by Pointless Meetings and acid reflux than Immunity Challenges and secret alliances. The idea of people being sent to strange locales where they are made to engage in bizarre competitions isn't even original. It's called sports, and it was around long before Thomas Edison produced the first reality show, an intriguing little silent film called Two Spaniards Dig a Medium-Sized Hole. And no, I don't watch sports either. Still too much like real life to me. For me, the less like reality a show is, the better. If I only got two channels and one of them showed Big Brother and the other showed the Teletubbies, it would be time for Tubby Watch-Watch.
The idea behind reality TV seems to be that if you put enough cameras on enough ordinary people for a long enough period of time, something like a coherent narrative will emerge. This, the experiment unfortunately reveals, is bullsh*t. If you film a million monkeys flinging poo, they do not eventually by sheer chance construct Michelangelo's "David" out of poo. And even if they did, it would still be made of poo, a notoriously ephemeral medium. Most Americans can't even name a single 20th century artist who worked primarily in poo, a fact which cannot be attributed entirely to the failings of the school system.
If you want to watch ugly people do boring things, go to the mall. TV should be reserved for beautiful people kissing or shooting at each other. The Amazing Race has the right idea by making sure to include a couple of teams selected purely for their aesthetic qualities. If I were the producer of that show, it would be hella hard to follow because every team would get the caption "Friends/Models." But it wouldn't matter, because when everybody is pretty, everybody wins.
What I really don't get is The Biggest Loser. If you want to pull viewers in at the beginning of the season, don't start with fat, ugly people. Start with pretty people and gradually make them fat and ugly. You could give the contestants prizes for eating the most bacon-wrapped Twinkies or having the biggest self-inflicted oozing sore. The only thing viewers love more than watching pretty people is watching pretty people get punished for being pretty. The Biggest Loser is doubly irritating to me because I had the idea for that show a year before it debuted. The only difference was that in my version the fat people were going to be kidnapped off the street by teams who were competing to bag the biggest lardass they could find, and they'd get extra points for people wearing spandex or lycra. Then each team would train their fat person to run an obstacle course, which their contestant would have to run while the other teams shot at them with pellet guns. Come to think of it, my version was quite a bit different.
Those of you who are my age may remember that reality TV started when producers were forced into airing more "unscripted" programs during a writer's strike during the late 80s. As I recall, sanitation workers in several major cities were striking around the same time, and the results of each strike were similar.
People generally cite The Real World as the beginning of the era of reality TV, but to me it all started with Cops. Now there was a reality show. No "characters", no "stories", no back stories or conflict resolution. No sports either, unless you consider the 500 meter shirtless 'hood run a sport. Nothing but an endless parade of depravity and idiocy. I'm grateful for the lack of coherency on Cops. I don't want to know about these losers' tragic childhood or their inevitable incarceration, release, and recidivism. If you give me too much information, these stories become tragedies. I want to remember these people at their peak -- as the guy who reported the theft of his pot stash to the cops, or the scrawny hippie dude who got the crap kicked out of him by his 400 pound wife. My all time favorite was the drunk guy who insisted he was a CIA agent. When the cop asked him if he could touch his nose with his fingertip, he dropped into a karate stance and said, "I can do this!" Now if reality was more like that, I'd watch less TV.
Labels: TV
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