Hey, look, I found something to write meta about!

[apocalypsos]

Cutting because this is going to get very, VERY long-winded. I can sum this up thusly:

Not all reality TV is bad. No, really.

For the longest time I did a lot of bitching about how all reality TV sucks. It's kind of the usual setting for most people. A lot of people are loathe to admit that they watch any reality television, because of course all reality television is exploitative, bad, tasteless and fake. No, seriously, all of it. And God forbid you admit you actually like a reality TV program, because someone will be sure to tell you something along the lines of reality television being a festering cesspool of suck.

Reality television hatred is the source of one of my most annoying pet peeves, which is when someone's response to me saying I like, say, Project Runway is to tell me that reality TV is manipulated for entertainment purposes. Yes, and the ship sinks at the end of Titanic, and Jared and Jensen aren't actually fucking no matter how much RPS I write about them.

Guess what? I KNOW.

You did notice that "for entertainment purposes" part, right? That's the part I focus on when I'm watching Project Runway or America's Got Talent. My addiction to reality television leans towards the cheesy talent competition angle. I like watching people use their talent, skills and training to win a prize. It's the perfect portion of reality television to point to when you want to knock reality television for producer manipulation. And you know what?

I don't care.

I used the list of reality shows off Wikipedia to see just how much of it I either watch or have watched.

Reality shows I love and watch obsessively:

The Amazing Race
Project Runway
America's Got Talent
Top Chef
Shear Genius
Top Design (I want to say that if they did another season I wouldn't watch, and yet. *sigh*)
Flipping Out (I don't even know.)

Reality shows I watch casually (as in, I won't drop everything to watch them but I have left them on just because there's nothing else on and they're not bad):

Airline
Miami Ink
Celebrity Fit Club
Wife Swap
Trading Spouses
Gene Simmons Family Jewels
Deal or No Deal (God help me, but ... but ... it's on right before Heroes! *sobs*)

Reality shows I formerly watched (in which I've watched or followed at least part of a season):

Road Rules
The Real World
Rescue 911
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
Monster House
Queer Eye For The Straight Guy
Changing Rooms/Trading Spaces
The Osbournes
Big Brother (just the first season)
Survivor

The thing about admitting you like reality television is that a lot of people immediately jump down your throat as if you just admitted you kick babies and eat puppies without seeming to comprehend that you can slap the reality TV moniker on a LOT of shit. I've seen pretty much everything that doesn't freely admit it uses actors and scripts labeled as reality television, which is kind of the point. I mean, if you really want to argue it, wrestling can and has been labeled as reality television when I think everybody in their right mind knows how much of it isn't reality. That's the whole thing -- you're supposed to play along, damn it.

I think this is me coming off the whole Kid Nation scandal where I've already seen some reaction to it that's very, "See? Reality TV is bad! Kill it, kill it! *stomp, stomp*" Are you fucking kidding me? Are you serious? Dude, read that article, or ANY article on that situation, and tell me that that's not just a bad idea, period. Let me put it this way -- if a producer comes up to you and says, "Sign over your children so they can be left alone in a deserted town with a bunch of other children and questionable diet and health care," YOU SAY NO. No, wait, I'm sorry, YOU SAY, FUCK YOU KINDLY WITH A JACKHAMMER. That's not a bad reality show, that's a bad TV show, wrapped up in a bad idea dipped in glazed stupidity sauce and swimming in sweet asshat gravy, and it doesn't make every other reality show evil incarnate by association.

It's like with Cliff assaulting Marcel last year on Top Chef -- just because that entire season was peopled with dicksmacks doesn't mean they should cancel the entire show and shut down Bravo's reality television department. It just means they should get better at not signing up dicksmacks as contestants. I mean, really, what else would they show without their reality TV reruns, right? ;)

When reality television is done well it's on par with scripted television with actors. Project Runway is a prime example of a great reality show -- it's well-edited, it's got a decent host in Heidi Klum (who's certainly gotten better at it over the run of the show) and a fabulous personality in Tim Gunn, it's got a prize that aims to nudge a designer's career forward (granted, it's not going to turn them into a Versace, but still), and it shows you the artistic process at work. It's got fabulous execution for a competitive reality show ... hell, for any television show. Even when it's awful, it's still pretty good.

I don't know. There's like this secret shame about saying you like reality TV, like you're supposed to be embarrassed if you say you like a reality TV show and add, "Oh, but that's the exception to the rule!" You know what? Fuck the exception to the rule. There's not just ONE good reality TV show and oh, all the rest are bad.

It's like with romance novels. I love them. I own bunches. I used to own more but I've given them to the local library and I could swear I lost a bunch of them in the move back to Pennsylvania. I was at work last night and talking to a buddy of mine (the one I went to the Mutter Museum with) and he made a comment about how cheesy and stupid romance novels are. I said, "I love romance novels," to which he added, "Oh, I meant just those trashy Harlequin novels where they put out eight different titles a month and they all suck." So I said, "You know what? I even like those." Are they bad and cheesy and cheap? Yeah, but they're also fun and stupid and awful sometimes in the best ways, and sometimes you really luck out and they're actually better than they should be.

Is reality TV exploitative? Oh, I'm not going to argue that. But I realized a little while ago that my embarrassment squick isn't as bad as I thought it was. (God knows I'd never be able to watch The Office otherwise.) My dangerousness squick, on the other hand, is HUGE. I had no problem whatsoever watching idiots embarrass the hell out of themselves at the America's Got Talent auditions, but Ivan the Urban Action Figure crashes into the stage and I can not watch. I still haven't seen the whole thing. I've seen him standing there on the side of the stage poised to jump over the line of chairs, and I've seen him lying facedown on the stage with stagehands all around him. And I've never seen anything on reality TV that I find half as embarrassing as those people behind news reporters or pretty much anybody holding a camera who hold up a sign or wave at a camera yelling, "HI, MOM!" Strangely enough, I can handle it just fine if you sign up to be an idiot on national TV -- more power to you, dude -- but you have five seconds of airtime and THIS is what you say? *headdesk*

The thing about reality TV is that no, I don't believe that is what those people are really like in real life. When I hear contestants complaining because editing made them into the villain, I understand. What I also understand is that this is the source material that you gave them to edit with. And as much as there are reality-show contestants that I loathe, I'm glad they went on national television and behaved like that. It makes it easier for me to know to avoid them in real life. You think I'm ever going to eat at a restaurant Ilan works at, if he ever bothers to stop skeeving his way through his fleeting celebrity to start one? God, no. I'd rather go back out to the sidewalk and order a hot dog from the nice guy with the oozing sore on his lip. (This also ties back to another reality-show pet peeve of mine which is when contestants say, "I'm here to compete, I'm not here to make friends." Which ninety-nine percent of the time is reality-show-speak for, "Instead of being friendly with everyone so that I can compete with a clear head, I'm going to start shit with everyone who crosses my path so that I spend the entire competition either pissed off or pissing people off.")

I really don't want to have to argue the validity of reality television as a source of entertainment, but if you say it like that -- "I like reality television" -- a lot of people's assessment of your intelligence drops, even if they watch American Idol or tune in every week for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition or never miss an episode of Dancing With The Stars. And I really hate the implication that reality television is some new and awful genre of television that's only popped up recently. Game shows, talk shows, docudramas, variety shows -- that's all reality TV in some form or another, and it's been around since the early days of television programming.

You say reality TV and people immediately think you're talking about Joe Millionaire or Flavor of Love or whatever lowest-common-denominator show is popular enough. Seriously, there's a lowest-common-denominator handful of shows in EVERY genre. The existence of Age of Love or Cheaters does not invalidate the fact that shows like American Idol, Project Runway and The Apprentice are great entertainment.

Pretty much everybody who watches TV inevitably watches something that counts as reality TV. Sometimes they even enjoy it. So knocking an entire genre just because of a few bad apples is just wrong, dude.

And for sitting through all of that, here's that clip of Paul Potts singing opera. (Hey, I consider it a present, damn it. :))

Comments

[fox1013.livejournal.com]

How do you think the networks are going to pay for the amazing shows that we love that cost a ton of money to produce, if not from the shows that can supplement their income by being relatively cheap to produce and yet garnering a fair amount of money nonetheless?