the appeal of reality shows

We want our art to be life-like, but somehow also, larger than life.

In 2008, more votes were cast for American Idol than for Barack Obama for president: 97 million for American Idol and, on Election Day, 70 million for Obama.

I try not to watch reality TV, but it happens anyway. My aunt and uncle, both of whom are pretty intellectual, live two doors down from me and watch reality TV, so I watch it with them sometimes. My wife (another vety intelligent person) watches America’s Next Top Model, so I’m all too familiar with that show as well. I think different people get sucked into reality shows for different reasons. My aunt and uncle seem to like the competition aspect. It becomes a blurry vision of televised sports (which also has that added sense of immediacy because it’s unfiltered, is "really" happening, and therefore there’s the feeling that in the next minute anything can happen adds to the excitement of a competition). My wife seems to like America’s Next Top Model for the elements you would find in a soap opera: the intrigue and fighting among the contestants. The producers have a way of typecasting and highlighting aspects of each girl’s personality for greater effect (nearly everyone wants to see beautiful young women gossip and argue). There’s also always at least one minor subplot. However scripted the show is, it’s more compellingthan standard soap operas. I like to see how reality shows are put together, especially the way in which the shows are a hybrid mutant of documentaries, game shows, and soaps. The producers have no problem blurring the lines between these three types of shows: they take what works and discard the rest.

My big-picture philosophy is that with shows like this, I don’t think our viewers necessarily differentiate between what’s scripted and what’s not. Our primary goal is to make a show that’s compelling.

Readers thirst for a narrative, any narrative, and will turn to the most compelling one.

Bored with the airbrushed perfection of Friends, we want to watch real people stuck on tropical islands without dental floss. We want our viewing to reflect our complicated, messy, difficult, overloaded, overstimulated lives. Let’s see messy houses getting clean, bratty children caught on hidden cameras, actual arguments between genuine young people being authentically solipsistic.

The bachelorette on the brink of true love with one of several men she has known for seven hours; the cad who manipulates his beloved on cue narratives: false actualization and authentic shame. The success of the genre reflects our lust for emotional meaning.We really do want to feel, even if that means indulging in someone else’s joy or woe. We have a thirst for reality (other people’s reality, edited) even as we suffer a surfeit of reality (our own--boring/painful).

Forms serve the culture; when they die, they die for a good reason: they’re no longer embodying what it’s like to be alive. If reality TV manages to convey something that a more manifestly scripted and plotted show doesn’t, that’s less an affront to writers than a challenge.

narrative-->modernism-->reality show

Reality is messy, it doesn't fit a neat, compelling narrative. As art gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more true to reality, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art, underprocessed, underproduced, splinters and explodes. An unfiltered documentary is fragmented, its meaning and purpose ambigious, ambivalent.

In contrast, memoir is constructed, because it's based on memory. Narrative is like memory. It is unreliable, constructed to create a certain effect.

How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it's fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there's almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to have been mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.

Memoir is a construct used by publishers to niche-market a genre between fact and fiction; an attempt to close in on its twin sister, the reality-show.

People in the 19th century started to get sick of narrative with all of its refined literary and plot devices. Modernism was the shift back to simplicity, a turn back toward messy, hard to understand, fragmented reality.

Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground.

Abstract expressionism in art was a similar attempt to recapture reality through its technique of spontaneous creation on the canvas. Rejected at first, it was accepted by the Establishment in the mid-20th century. Pollack and Rothko are now considered artistic geniuses because they forced artists to rethink the role and purpose of painting.

Then people got sick of abstract, difficult documentary-art. A longing for narration, story, archetype rose up again. But we didn't go right back to poetry with rhyme, novels with plot, art with representation, music with melody and harmony...we got jazz, the reality-show, the memoir, the remix, a hybrid of real and fake, the authentic fake. It had both the spontaneity of life (reality) with the order and appeal of narration and myth.