Whose Reality is It, Anyway?

I don't watch what's been coined in the last few years as "reality TV." I'm not sure on the facts, but I believe that COPS may have been the genesis of "real life" TV, which used to be called documentaries last time I checked, but language is a malleable thing. So the bottom line is that I avoid like the plague immensely popular fare such as COPS, When <insert noun> Attacks, America's Most Anything, the Real World, Big Brother, and of course, Survivor. I haven't watched one second of that show, but admit that I have caught the latter half of a police chase show that proved to be entertaining enough to leave on while I worked on projects in front of the TV. I often use the TV in that sense. I am a hobbyist who is constantly working at my big project table (actually a folding card table), and since I live alone, I have the TV tuned to something entertaining or play videos. Voyeur programming is not part of what I define as entertaining, though.

First, I am not by any stretch of the imagination a PBS snob. Even an Anglophile such as myself gets sick of a steady diet of English accents. I also decided to actually make at least one of Norm Abrams' projects before clogging up my video shelves with more woodworking shows. Otherwise I'd never go back and tape over the episodes featuring projects of no use to me.

I can and do watch the History Channel when it's showing something about the Revolutionary War or those lovely "Haunted History" shows (have I missed the Titanic and Salem Witch Trial documentaries? Could someone from the HC please give me a call? Thanks ever so much). I've tasted the dual red-garnished imports of Red Green and Red Dwarf, from Canada and Britain, respectively. I stopped watching Are You Being Served? after hearing references to "President Carter" and realized that show had to be the BBC's equivalent of Three's Company in the States. And yes, I *know* 3's C was really a remake of Man About the House, also from Britain. But my video shelves are packed to overflow with archives of The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Dilbert, the PJs, all 8 seasons of Red Dwarf (don't be too impressed. Each "season" conisted of 8 episodes), South Park, Celebrity Deathmatch, and horrible sci-fi convention-purchased collection videos of Star Trek bloopers and/or parodies. Also, those woodworking shows I mentioned, which I've labeled as "This Old House of Frankenstein."

Some of you by now might be thinking Okay, so she likes cartoons. Some of us aren't stuck in sad little fantasy worlds full of Star Wars toys and videogames. Personally, I wish I had more Star Wars videogames and had the time to play a Sony Playstation, if I ever broke down and bought one. Others might be thinking My GOD, this chick rambles incessantly. Does she have a point or does she just like hearing herself write? Both, actually. The popularity of the current crop of reality TV baffles me. On the other hand, any cultural "expert" would list other TV and/or news media trends that seemed to saturate every minute of programming, then finally fade into the background. For instance, instead of just soap operas, or just game shows, or just talk shows, or just informercials, there seems to be a kind of unhappy balance between all four, plus miscellaneous goodies such as the cartoons of the WB.

So what's wrong with reality TV, bitch? some of the more opinionated readers might be wondering, if they've made it this far. For me, lots and lots. If I'm getting a good chunk of the picture from the small amount of info I get from articles on the more popular shows, it could be said that none of them are comprised of people that actually like each other. Forget about long-lasting friendships or even romances. Throw a bunch of strangers together and make them live together for a length of time, and it seems from what I read and hear that they stay that way. Obviously millions of humans find this kind of social dynamic to be fascinating, or they wouldn't be watching those Survivor people back-stabbing each other in order to make it through 39 days of hell for a lousy million bucks. I refer to that sum as "lousy" because, minus taxes that cut the amount practically in half, you still can't retire for the rest of your life on it. Or more specifically, retire at the age of 33 (an age which is uncannily similar to my own). Hell, if I were expected to eat rodents and bugs for a couple of months, I'd never want to have to work again. The producers would have to fix the lottery or the Publishers Clearing House in my favor. I think of Bruce Willis' character in Armageddon, where he announces that an item on his comrades' demands is to "never pay taxes again. Ever."

But it's not simply my feeling that the "prize" is never enough for the participants in these shows. After all, I'm not going to win anything; that's a given. It's just that these shows bore me at the very least, and at their worst, depress me. I keep thinking that Lord of the Flies was mere speculative fiction, and that humans wouldn't really revert to even baser instincts than we're currently employing to one-up each other on a daily basis. I keep thinking that communism in its purest form can work if the group is small enough or in dire enough circumstances. At its core, communism simply states "everyone will work together towards a common goal," whatever it might be. Such as, I don't know, building cozy Gilligan's Island huts and making coconut cream pies. That show may have been a stupid comedy and be the main source of comparison for Survivor, but hell, at least they liked each other. Just think of how many times they should have killed Gilligan for screwing up their chances for escape, but didn't. Because Bob Denver had a contract! Er, sorry, I meant to say because they liked him!

The boredom part is easy to explain. Not a lot happens on these shows, in spite of careful editing of the hours and days and weeks and months of footage these poor film crews have to collect. I don't even want to know what the camera crews' bodies feel like after hefting those things all day. Unlike Survivor, I have seen more than a few seconds of Real World, which as far as I know consist mostly of "interviews" with the "casts," with actual bits of reality interspersed throughout. Either that or the two or three episodes I've seen were flukes. Even so, I'm not sure what the Incredible Turning Point : Mundane Everyday Stuff ratio is on these shows, but I imagine them to be quite large, with MES taking up the much higher number.

Now for my exception. I watched all four installments of The 1900 House on PBS (and yes, I am one of those senseless wastes of human life who never sends in money for their programming). I did this because I am very interested in Victorian culture and saw this as a splendid way to learn about daily life for such a family, outside of reading books on the subject. So did the actual English family chosen for the experiment see it, although not all of them enjoyed the experience. As "high-brow" as the concept was, though, there were moments of tedium in the series, since again a lot of airtime was taken up by the various family members speaking into the camera set up in the closet. So we the viewers heard how miserable and uncomfortable and tired and dirty they were quite a bit, but didn't necessarily see all the reasons why. Not that I personally would have turned out much better. The women had to wear corsets all the time, for one thing. I am extremely overweight. To attempt to shove my blubber into an unforgiving bit of metal and fabric could very well have caused some serious health problems down the road, never mind flat-out suffocation before the viewers' eyes. "The family is reduced by one as Maramcc turns blue and dies during dinner. Yet still there is Washing Day to make it through..."

I will not end this with a list of "reality TV I'd like to see," because the truth is that I can only think of one. That would be to take all the "real" witches currently in residence in Salem, Massachusetts, plus a film crew, and send them back to Salem of 1692 and see how well their Wiccan ways are received by the inhabitants. I suggest this not because I am a Bible-thumper who thinks they're all Satan worshippers who really *should* be hanged, but because they're overdoing the irony of Salem being known as the "Witch City." And this is an official moniker, too, not just something the locals like to call it. I happen to live within spitting distance of Salem and have adopted it as my favorite city, and yes, because of its unique history. Plus it's got the best comic book/collectables store I've ever seen. But I'm not into witches and never have been. The only witch anywhere near the place in 1692 was Tituba, a black female slave from Barbados who couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. The rest were God-fearing Christians unjustly accused by the ultimate in out-of-control teenagers. I'm all for acknowledging local history, but my guess is that those God-fearing Puritans that were imprisoned, hanged, and pressed to death would be just as stunned by the capitalization on that nasty moment of the "Witch City's" history, as the overzealous public servants who condemned them would be. Since humans love irony, Salem is one of those cities making lots of money off of it, as occult shops are as common there as Dunkin' Donuts are everywhere else in New England. Oh, there are Dunkin' Donuts there, too, of course. As for Starbuck's, I have no idea. I understand all this could fall into the category of giving people what they want, meaning those museum-visiting tourists who ask the guides 3,000 times a day, "So where are the witches now?" But rather than have the guides beat them over the head with hardbound Bibles and demand to know if the schmucks had listened to a word they'd just been saying, the city has catered to this by allowing entrepreneurial Wiccans to flock to the place and make a living selling "witchy" merchandise such as incense, amulets, jewelry and tarot card readings to occult-hungry travelers. So I say let Laurie Cabot stay as the city's only "official" witch to satisfy the public, and send the rest of them back to Salem 1692 and give CBS a new concept for the next "Survivor."