Reality TV

All I can say is, Why?

What possible attributes do so-called Reality tv shows possess that would generate audiences for these inane video records of really stupid people doing really stupid things?

As a good friend of mine likes to say, “If I want to watch a lot of idiots doing stupid things, I can just spend an hour at K-Mart.”

Maybe, with a compelling scenario and a small number of interesting characters, I could understand the possible interest in a one-time, half-hour documentary dealing with a real family, a real office staff, or a real school classroom.

But a program focusing on dysfuntional people doing embarrassingly stupid things again and again and again, week after week after week? I just don’t get it. I don’t understand what compels people of normal intelligence tuning in to watch these forms of so-called entertainment on  a regular basis.

The theory, or one of them at least, is that we watch reality shows for the same reasons we are compelled to slow down on the freeway to gaze at a car crash; namely, we feel a certain sense of relief that we weren’t the ones who were involved in an accident, or that we aren’t as stupid as the people we see on reality shows.

Then again, the very act of watching a reality show immediately dispels the argument that a viewer is smarter than the people on the show he is watching.

I guess what bothers me most is the idea that people from other countries might see some of these shows and think that the people featured on them are representative of average Americans. How embarrassing for us all!

But even scarier is the possibility that these stupid people really do represent the average American.

Yikes! Maybe we do deserve to see American exceptionalism crashing down around us.

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