Comment: Your Reality (by Mark Cavdar)

In the summer of 2000, North America began its tawdry love-affair with reality television when the series finale of the first edition of the breakout series “Survivor” attracted more than 50 million viewers, becoming a bona fide event and spawning a slew of clones and competitors. “Reality” television has tunneled itself into the very fabric of popular culture, colliding headfirst with societal norms, reprogramming the mentality of the casual television watcher and further rotting at the scant traces of old-world morality found in the mainstream.

Trials of infidelity, self-improvement contests, masochistic game shows and superficial model searches, all coated in a gloss of Machiavellian gamesmanship, have replaced traditional television dramas and sitcoms as the fodder for water-cooler conversation. It has sculpted the nation into a commune of voyeurs, raving sadists who take pleasure in toasting the shortcomings of others and derive enjoyment from others pain and humiliation. Reality television has created an obsessive compulsive state, one that interests itself more with who was fired on the last edition of “The Apprentice” rather than real, relevant, pressing world issues. The medium’s newest sub-genre is also its most harmful, and has committed the worst crime of all: turning its indulgence into something socially acceptable.

How much is too much? What many thought would be a passing fad, a drop in the bucket in the history of television, has become one of television’s stalwart standards, showing no signs of slowing. Rather than fading out, reality TV has adapted to accommodate the changing preferences of the audience, extending its unscripted dominion to incorporate programming that appeals to all ends of the television-viewing spectrum. Let no middle-class housewife go without her self-improvement beauty pageants, and no 18-25 year old teenage male be without a well-manicured, bikini-clad temptress on a hedonistic paradise island!

During the past year alone, 492 new reality television programs debuted in primetime in nine major countries (the United States of America, Germany and Britain among them), accounting for a whopping 39% of all new broadcast material aired. Often smiled upon by network executives, reality TV is a sound investment for broadcasting companies due to their cost-efficiency. Although many would debate this statement, reality TV has virtually extinguished primetime television’s need for writers. Its actors cost very little, often plucking the average Joes and Janes from the mundane obscurity of their routine lives and giving them the opportunity of a lifetime.

Hundreds of thousands of starry-eyed individuals audition for reality TV annually, each craving their fifteen minutes in the spotlight. This is where the allure of reality TV can be found: the pseudo-celebrity status reality TV affords its participants can be achieved even by the average Joes and Janes who spend their free moments watching. The slight tease of fame and fortune (in the form of a requisite prize offered at the end of the embarrassing show) is enough to induce grimaces, followed by nagging thoughts in the back of one’s mind whispering “that could just as easily be you.”

If reality TV were a circus, then the North American Fox network, a subsidiary of the enormous Newscorp conglomerate, would become its crudest and most brutal ringleader. More than half of the Fox network’s fall television offerings for the 2004 season were unscripted reality fare. Viewers hungry for more reality TV found among these new programs an hour-long drama about a painfully British nanny-for-hire service that teaches naughty American toddlers discipline when their own fledgling mothers have lost hope, an exploitative dating special featuring an eligible midget bachelor picking from a litter of eligible midget bachelorettes, and countless more home renovation programs.

The Fox Network is also home to the most repulsive exercise in exploitative television with its ugly duckling makeover beauty pageant “The Swan.” The show’s premise is simple: take average, unglamorous women, give them a complete makeover with the help of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery, and place them in competition in a beauty pageant that anoints the most beautifully reformed ugly duckling. This trashy exercise in exploitation masquerading as female empowerment under the banner of self-esteem and image repair is truly one of popular culture’s lowest points, but never to stop pushing the boundaries of bad taste, Fox’s newest reality stunt is also its most degrading and outrageous.

“Who’s Your Daddy,” a 90 minute special Fox has slated to air on its schedule in January 2005, has a dubiously appalling premise that such a tongue in cheek title hardly validates. A woman, given up for adoption in infancy, meets with eight men, seven of which are actors and one of whom is her birth father she has yet to meet. If the woman can correctly choose which of these potential paternal figures is the real deal, she will receive a cash reward of $100,000. But alas, if she chooses incorrectly, the impostor of her selection will pocket the dough.

Taking something as deeply personal and important as reuniting an orphan with a biological parent and turning it into an overwrought spectacle packaged for the gleeful entertainment of the television audience goes beyond the simple parameters of tastelessness. It is a slap in the face of the millions of individuals who have had difficult experiences in reuniting with their families. It hints at the rotting core of our social moral fabric; that a producer with this keen idea could actually sell the concept to a major network expecting people to tune in and play along is a sad indicator of what has become of the North American mentality.

The show has stirred an uproar among adoption advocates, including single mother Deborah Capone, who launched a grassroots campaign to boycott the show by targeting Fox affiliates and prospective advertisers. So moved was Capone that she collected over 5000 signatures in protest of the show, hoping to stop what she labeled a “voyeuristic display.” Coming from the network notorious for airing programming gems such as “Married…With Children” and “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” the network will most likely weather Capone’s protest unfazed.

The most pressing question that springs to mind upon hearing the news of this program isn’t so much who could think of such a thing, but rather, who would watch such dreck? One could argue that the spectacle merely fulfills a perverse curiosity, much in the same vein of slowing down on the freeway to scope out the damage sustained by metal and flesh in a horrific automobile accident. But is nothing sacred anymore? Is there a line television networks are unwilling to cross to further reel in more viewers? What’s next – televised live child births, with the mother forced to pick her offspring out of a litter of incubators for a cash prize? The rate at which things are changing, the idea doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

This is the problem. Why did we let things get to this point?

Sources

Brook, Stephen. “Thousands urge Fox to ditch adoption show.” MediaGuardian. 23 December 2004. 1 January 2005. <http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1379256,00.html>.

Carvajal, Doreen. “Reality TV goes beyond a slice of life.” International Herald Tribune. 27 December 2004. 1 January 2005. <http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/business/TV27.html>.

“New Fox show: Adoptee IDs dad for $100K.” CNN. 15 December 2004. 1 January 2005. <http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/12/15/tv.foxs.daddy.ap/>.

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