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The Lack of Reality in Reality TV

© Carey Goodman

It is one of the strangest multi-cultural phenomena to have such vast impact, and its falsity begins with its self-given label.

Whether your objective is cooking dinner, building a house, replicating colonial or frontier American living conditions, repairing a vehicle, getting a job, finding a spouse or csame-sex partner, winning a recording contract, or almost anything else the mind can contrive, there is a reality show for you. Many of these topics should receive the obvious introductory questions: "How can you make a television program about that, and who will actually watch it?" The answers to such inquiries are somewhat less obvious than the questions: "Find a host who verbally assaults the participants, make the participants really hate each other, build on those rivalries, and people by the millions will watch it".

This in fact is a very sad commentary, but it seems to be the one banal truth of "reality TV". First, there is absolutely nothing "real" about "reality TV". Some proponents of the format argue that it demonstrates how real people act in real situations, but how often are people who find they are dumped in the middle of the jungle or on some island instantly divided into various teams and given purely absurd "challenges" to undertake to please a "jury"? How often can an employer tell an employee: "You are fired!", and the matter ends there? Very rarely can that happen without some well-documented cause for the termination.

Participants on these shows regularly refer to what they do as "playing the game", and in fact that is all it is: This is the twenty-first century version of the game show. There is no actual or substantive difference in voting someone off the island or off the stage and selecting what is behind door number one, two, or three or choosing a vowel or consonant from the "Wheel of Fortune". Even the rewards for "triumph" are the same: The game shows give the winner money and prizes; "reality TV" shows also give the winner money and prizes.

Why do so many people watch these shows? The reason seems to be based on the same psycho-babble explanations of why so many people listen to all the radio talk show "shock jocks" and all the programs whose hosts it seems are paid to insult their listeners and callers. There must exist among a sizeable segment of the population a basic desire to be reassured that somewhere out there is someone who is a whole lot worse in a whole lot of ways than they are. Why else would anyone watch TV shows where the host gains fame by verbally ravaging the losers of the night?