Why reality TV works best when it’s fake
Reality TV used to have the pretence of actually being based on reality. But that was just an insult to our intelligence, writes Joe Hildebrand.
SmartDaily
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I was staring at the back page of my Sunday paper, as one does at a certain hour of the morning, when I realised after an indeterminate amount of time that the person I was looking at was Sam Frost.
Sam is, by all accounts, a perfectly lovely, normal girl who first failed to find love on The Bachelor and then failed to find it again on The Bachelorette. She’s now on The All New Full Monty and if that doesn’t work then, like the lead singer of Foreigner, I don’t know what love is.
Good for her, I thought, before remembering that I had no particular interest in her life. But that, of course, is the point.
Reality TV used to have the pretence of being actually about reality, be it as a fly-on-the-wall sneak peek of suburbia such as Sylvania Waters, or as a social experiment such as Married At First Sight. But then Sylvania Waters morphed into Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Married At First Sight morphed into, well, Married At First Sight.
Cultural elites like to turn their nose up at this sort of fare, suggesting it is vulgar or insulting to the intelligence. In fact the most insulting thing to the intelligence was when reality TV pretended to be real. Now that fig leaf’s flown out the window we can all sit back and relax.
It’s certainly more relaxing than Raised by Wolves, HBO’s sci-fi thriller about a small off-grid self-sustaining society run by an androgynous atheist android called Mother who liquidates anybody who doesn’t conform to her strict dogmatic programming – which is what reality TV would look like if it was scripted by the Greens.
Indeed, one of the show’s lessons seems to be that we all need a little religion in our lives, and reality TV is the new religion.
Like the Greek myths of old, it is a web of morality tales in which good and evil do battle in forms that look just like us – although, like the gods, they are a bit better-looking and have a lot more sex.