Reality check

Frank and I don't have cable. We have a digital antenna, HuluPlus, and Netflix. (And of course, I can pass hour after hour watching videos on YouTube.) All together, it really helps keep us entertained well.

Every once in a while, we'll go to someone's house who has all 2 million channels cable TV offers. Before we bought our house and lived in an apartment, we had cable, and paid about $120 per month for it, and the majority of the channels were the ones we didn't watch. We really think cable should be available à la carte, in other words, only pay for the channels you want to watch...none of this "package" bullshit.

Anyway, we were at a relative's house, and we were watching Oxygen, and it was showing What's Love Got To Do With It, the very amazing, very sad, very inspiring true story of pop/soul singer Tina Turner's life. But what really irritated me wasn't so much the commercial breaks, but the kinds of reality shows they were promoting. The main show being advertised was The Bad Girls Club, and it showed a few clips of women fighting, pulling each other's hair, bad-mouthing each other, and I thought to myself:

I can't believe people are entertained by this crap.

It's TRUE! These shows wouldn't be on the air unless there were people wanting to watch this...crap. 

Have we really sunken so low as a society, as a culture to want to watch and be entertained by others' misbehavior? I mean, really?!

I concede I've never watched The Bad Girls Club and cannot just judge based on the commercial...but...I can. What else is a TV show with such a title supposed to be about? What? Are they doing charity work making sure more villages in Africa are getting clean drinking water? I doubt it.

But then after being repulsed by the commercial I had just seen, I thought more about other reality shows:

Jersey Shore
Keeping Up With the Kardashians
Real Housewives of [insert city here]

I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking of, but that's all I can get off the top of my head that have NO plot, no "writers", and just watch people doing stupid shit, catching it on camera, and therefore making their viewers think, Okay, I'm not as bad as Snooki or start passing judgments like, Kim had a $3 million wedding, and she was divorced in less than 3 months?! That's messed up!

That's because it is messed up.

We either don't like our own lives, or are too bored with them that we want to see how others live and compare lifestyles. The truth is when we see someone party hard on national TV, and then do something very humiliating, we tend to think better about ourselves, taking comfort in the fact that there's someone out there who's making worse decisions than we do.

The only reality shows I can understand are those that are competitions for a prize:

American Idol
X Factor
The Voice 
Sing-Off
[insert country]'s Got Talent
The Glee Project
America's Next Top Model
Project Runway
So You Think You Can Dance
Dancing With the Stars

I get all those because there, actually talented people are given the time to shine to show the world what they can do. But as for all the other reality shows I mentioned, those have no point other than to let viewers see humans behaving badly.

Then there are the shows that are a mix of behaving badly, and getting a prize:

Celebrity Apprentice 
Hell's Kitchen
Master Chef  

We also have some educational reality shows:

Myth Busters 


...and shows featuring people with unusual lifestyles:

19 Children and Counting (or whatever the Duggars' show is called)
(Jon and) Kate + 8



...shows that inspire and do good for others:

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
The Biggest Loser

My biggest beef with reality TV is more against shows like the first 3 I mentioned. There seems to be no point to them whatsoever except feeling better about yourself because someone's a bigger idiot than you.

Sadly, right now it seems that American entertainment is becoming predominantly - unless it already is predominantly - about watching other people, and living vicariously through them. Why must we do this? Why must such entertainment exist? I'm grateful we still have great shows with actual writers telling a story - stories that make us laugh, cry, watch in awe, leave us in suspense, play with our fantasies, dreams, and guilty pleasures, etc.

I guess the reason we have so many different types of shows is that so many different types of people live in this country, and everyone is entertained in their own way. Two people can watch Family Guy, and while one will be laughing hysterically, the other will be repulsed by the irreverent humor. But even if this highly simplified explanation for the justification of the variety of entertainment now available, it doesn't change the fact that there are still millions of people out there who are entertained by the trashier, pointless shows.


This has been a reality check about reality TV.