BIG IDEAS FOR A RICHER LIFE
Get Real: How Reality TV Is Ruining Your Life.
Sure they’re entertaining, but the likes of Survivor
and The Hills might actually be undermining reality
as you know it.
Television pioneer Allen Funt used to say that his show taught
lessons in subversion. Big talk for a man who specialized in
putting average folks into situations ranging from the befud-
dling to the banal and filming their reactions for laughs. Funt
probably never understood the scope of the “subversion” Candid
Camera helped set in motion, or that the reality-based dynam-
ics of his antics would evolve and reverberate into not only a
television revolution but also a progressive alteration of the
mass consciousness—and, finally, a systematic defrocking of our
notions of reality.
Today, Reality TV is much more than a collection of mean-
spirited tricks (Punk’d notwithstanding). It’s been divided into a
thousand subgenres, consuming and re-slanting the documentary,
the game show, the news magazine, the sitcom, the talent contest
and the variety show, colliding and cross-pollinating them with
the abandon of a latter-day Dr. Moreau.
It makes for damn good television. Viewer numbers show
Reality TV at the top of every ratings/share. It also makes up the
majority of all television aired worldwide. There is an economic
factor to this. Reality TV is cheap to make. But cheap or not, we
wouldn’t watch if we didn’t like what we saw.
So what the hell is going on here? Do we really care who
wins $1,000,000 for living on a beach for 30 days? Are the
lives of tattoo artists and custom cycle builders really that
interesting? Is it just voyeurism, like banging on the glass at
the gorilla exhibit?
82 Sharp Oct/Nov 2008 SHARPFORMEN.COM
The answer of course is yes. And no.
If Reality TV is too large to be effectively summed up—and
it is—it is also too democratic to be pinned down. From the
vapid faux-life of Gene Simmons’ Family Values to the nutri-
educational activism of Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners, from the
historicity of 1900 House to Porn Valley’s docu-verité titillation,
from the culinary-crisis-relief of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
to Survivor’s campfire office politics, there’s little consensus on
subject, tone or format—shows like Top Chef, Project Runway,
and So You Think You Can Dance have even given a clandestinely
highbrow lustre to the reality show.
There is simply too much at play in the chaos of reality
programming. So what’s the elusive factor? Why does Reality
TV have so many avid viewers? And why do they span such a
diverse cross-section of the populace?
Perhaps one of the best/worst-kept secrets in Reality TV is
that these shows are written. They’re not written in the sense
that Mad Men or Californication are written—and what gets
written is largely at the whim of what “characters” actually do on
camera—but they are written nonetheless.
Writers carefully track the themes that surface during filming
and—playing off the tensions and struggles of participants—
tease stories from the edited footage. Such efforts produce the
narrative arcs that drive every reality show from Canadian Idol
to The Real World to Holmes on Homes. And that’s the hook—
we’re suckers for the story, even when it isn’t very good.
Of course, our love of story is a deeply rooted one. After all, a
life is little more than the narrative you author for yourself. And
a good deal of the richness of life stems from how well one does
that—consciously or unconsciously.
Our world provides—in the form of books, films, comics,
songs and television—lessons in how to build better narratives
for ourselves, lessons we can use or fail to use in drafting our
stories. And Reality TV, with its unvarnished expressions and
verité stylings is especially tempting for this purpose because it
looks like life, or at least something that closely resembles it. But
this is where things get weird and where the line between fact
and fiction can easily get blurred.
Particularly with shows like The Hills, Single in the City and
Laguna Beach—reality soaps that encroach on the narrative
domains of fictional programs like Melrose Place, Sex and the
City, and The OC—the subversion of reality is extreme.
By inserting “real people” into the melodrama of these soap
operas and allowing those people to be celebritized both as real
people and as characters, it becomes nearly impossible to distin-
guish the already thin divide between reality, reality program-
ming, and the spiritual void of celebrity culture.
It’s not that we’re in danger of mistaking Reality TV for
authentic experience. It’s that in taking clues from Reality TV
on how to script our lives—clues that are all too easy to extrapo-
late from the brutally simplistic but oh-so-compelling narratives
of reality programming—we risk losing the ability to recognize
the genuine article when we encounter it.
DYLAN YOUNG
ILLUSTRATION: ROCCO COMMISSO