The Ugly Reality of "Reality TV"

In recent years the phenomenon of what is commonly referred to as "Reality TV" has taken over a good deal of the broadcasting schedule for the major television networks in the USA, with bleed over into Canadian and other foreign markets.

The term is a misnomer, if ever there was one, as none of the contrived situations and highly orchestrated and heavily edited video products bears any resemblance to any reality I have ever been exposed to.

In many cases these are merely souped up game shows.  The contestants often have to compete on a much longer scale and in range of competitive matches that are, for the most part, less seemly, shall we say?  Instead of answering a series of general knowledge questions, racing against a clock, having their consumer knowledge tested or even spinning a wheel, these contestants are often placed in situations and put through contests that measure their ability to connive, to decieve, to manipulate and to undermine.

The movement towards "Reality TV", many industry reviewers have observed, was sparked by higher costs for guild represented script writers and performers needed to produce the old television staples of sit-coms and dramas juxtaposed with declining market share in the "500 channel universe" and resulting reduced revenues.

The solution was amateurs.  Instead of actors, use amateurs.  Instead of writers, use unscripted contrived circumstances.  When amateur "performers" are put in contrived circumstances, made to compete over lavish prizes to ratchet up the pressure and video-taped round-the-clock then finding an hour's worth of usable entertainment from the footage taken is almost unavoidable.

So, instead of creative performing arts as spectacle we are fed the best residue that forced conflict between "ordinary people" can produce.

This says a lot about the industry that dominates the amazing technology of television broadcasting.  Here is a medium of extraordinary power, one that can disseminate information, knowledge and entertainment to the public at large at little cost.  This technology has the power to provide university level education to the masses and raise society's overall skills, knowledge and productivity exponentially.  We have long known that television was not fulfilling this potential.  Instead of university courses we have been fed low-brow entertainment intended to draw the largest audience for advertisers, the economic drivers of the medium.

So television produced such classicly uninspired programming as Gomer Pyle and Gilligan's Island along with Three's Company and Charlie's Angels.  These were formulaic, juvenile, simplistic and titillating.  They amounted to the entertainment equivalent of fast food.

But at least they were written by creative writers, they had plots, the performers were professionals, they delivered the laughs and the action.

Now we have taken the whole thing down a peg.  Now we have basically no writers, bumbling amateurs stumbling around on camera and the entire show is essentially outtakes.  In seeking the lowest common denominator, the television industry has discovered that there was yet a lower bottom to the barrel to scrape.

But what does it say about the audience that watches this drek?

Why are people entertained by watching other people behave poorly?  The "contestants" on these shows act in ways that we would, or at least should, never tolerate in society or in the interactions of our own social circles.  They are duplicitous, disingenuous, petty and vindictive.  They are willing to debase themselves by performing vile acts, consuming revolting things and airing their own dirty laundry before a mass market audience. 

There was a time when the polite thing to do if someone were to engage in such vulgar behaviour would be to look away.  Now we tune in as nations of voyeurs.

Is it really so entertaining to watch people lie and cheat and accost one another profanely?  Is it really so titillating to watch people reduce themselves, through their own voluntary behaviour, to animals and savages for a monetary reward?

Personally, I find nothing at all amusing or even distracting about people's bad behaviour.  The world is filled with enough of it already and I see no need to pay people to engage in deliberate acts of bad manners and demonstrations of poor upbringing.

My hope has long been that people would soon tire of watching amateurs stumble around trying to approximate the skills of truly creative and experienced entertainers.  I had hoped that this time would have long since arrived.  For the sake of our cultural development, let us hope that it arrives soon.

This sad and sorry spectacle seems to me a sure sign of the imminent collapse of our civilization.