Get Real [the Informer] - Dylan Young - Sharp - Oct2008

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 befuddling 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 dynamics 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 meanspirited 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 nutrieducational 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 distinguish the already thin divide between reality, reality programming, 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 extrapolate 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