IN MY CORNER of the world, there are two kinds of people I generally abhor: those who pretend they don’t watch television, and those who do watch television, but pretend they don’t watch reality television. To the former, I usually display awe–you can also live without Jimmy Reed albums, red meat, or sex, I marvel, but why would you want to? But it is the latter for whom I really have contempt. Reality TV, the critical line goes, is counterfeit entertainment. As sad-sack sleuths like the Washington Post’s television critic Tom Shales assert–there is nothing real about it. And thank God for that. Actual reality would mean training a camera on Tom Shales as he sits on his sofa eating Pringles, while writing really nasty one-liners about bad sitcoms on his laptop. Give me “Temptation Island 2” any day.
Equally specious is the argument that the glut of reality programming is keeping more respectable original programming off the air. Is our world really the poorer for not having a seventh “Law and Order” spin-off? Will our children be culturally malnourished if television executives can’t counter-program with the next “According to Jim”? To the contrary, reality TV is actually faster, smarter television. It forces the viewer to become invested in characters, and turns television-watching from a slack-jawed, passive pursuit, into an interactive, and in some cases, cardiovascular one (as you retrieve food and drink items thrown at the screen in disgust, while witnessing the endless parade of human debris). In reality TV, a moral order is evident. Good is usually rewarded, evil punished. Reality TV is something like life, only it has more attractive characters, is better lit, and comes with lots of commercials so that you can take a bathroom break or get a snack without worrying about missing anything. Its cast members, whether eating grub worms or raining epithets on their own mothers, prove regularly that they will do anything, abase themselves in any way, just to be on television. In this last respect, reality TV most strongly impersonates reality.
