David Stairs
The irony about reality television is how incredibly over-produced most of it is. I mean, the conceit is that this medium is supposed to provide candid insight into human nature, but much of it is about as “normal” as a choreographed fight on Jerry Springer used to be.
First, the premise. When Big Brother debuted nearly 30 years ago, the idea of throwing a group of strangers into a highly surveilled environment for ten or twelve weeks seemed risqué. That such a pressure cooker might lead to conflict is obvious. Add to that the idea that house members are competing for a large cash prize, and you’re bound to bring out the worst in people, and this is exactly what happened. The infamous Richard Hatch, first winner of Survivor, proved that villains do win. Often.
These two examples, the most mainstream granddaddies of the reality scene, are perhaps no longer representative of a world that has changed completely since the late ’90s. Nowadays, there is a whole industry of production companies, from Endemol and Bertrand van Munster’s World Race Productions to Sharp Entertainment’s 90-Day Fiancé franchise, now owned by SONY. Add to this the oddball personalities like Rob Warne and Jasmine Pineda, who make whole careers of reality show participation, and one begins to wonder just how productions vet their contestants.
The social media sphere has done a lot to supplement the meager compensation participants receive on reality shows, with Instagram and Tik Tok followings and product endorsement deals allowing many to enjoy a temporary windfall. Another matter is the variety of themes. One can follow the agonies and missteps of the overweight, the unloved and the multiply married all on the TLC channel alone. This leads viewers to see themselves possibly on screen, whatever their personal idiosyncrasies might be.
There are shows about cooking, like Hell’s Kitchen, or shows about yachting, like Bravo’s Below Deck, and plenty of shows about pretty people, like Love Island. But the 90-Day Fiancé franchise has perfected the art of the spin-off. Based on the idea of following Americans searching for love overseas by pursuing a K-1 visa for their loved one, the series has documented the potential and actual mishaps of transcultural love before, during, and after the honeymoon.
The most frustrating aspect of these shows is the manipulative way these often formulaic love stories are drawn out week after week for the purpose of selling advertising. Few, if any of the stories are that compelling. Many, if not most, end unhappily. Some experiences result in suicide. The recruitment staff obviously searches for half-baked or terminally naive participants, which makes it difficult to sustain sympathy for a situation presented as “reality” that is so patently unreal.
While a reality situation, like Naked and Afraid, which documents unclothed people dropped into remote outdoor circumstances and expected to hunt, gather, and make do for three weeks, may seem ludicrous, home improvement programs, like Homestead Rescue, act as the counterweight to HGTV shows that really owe their existence to legacy shows like This Old House. It’s obvious that as long as there is an available, bored, semi-literate audience, which unfortunately describes much of the American viewing public, there will always be a place for reality programming, no matter how silly or predictable the outcomes.
Philosophers have argued about the nature of reality for millennia. If what passes for “reality” on cable and pay-per-view has anything to do with the actual real, I am truly and completely as the British say “gobsmacked.”
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
