Television: Why Reality TV Is Good For Us

For eight single professional women gathered in Dallas, it is holy Wednesday–the night each week that they gather in one of their homes for the Traveling Bachelorette Party. Munching snacks and passing a bottle of wine, they cheer, cry and cackle as their spiritual leader, Trista Rehn, braves heartache, indecision and the occasional recitation of bad poetry to choose from among her 25 swains. Yet something is unsettling Leah Hudson’s stomach, and it’s not just the wine. “I hate that we’ve been sucked into the Hoover vac of reality TV,” says Hudson, 30. “Do we not have anything better to do than to live vicariously through a bunch of 15-minute-fame seekers?”

There you have the essence of reality TV’s success: it is the one mass-entertainment category that thrives because of its audience’s contempt for it. It makes us feel tawdry, dirty, cheap–if it didn’t, we probably wouldn’t bother tuning in. And in this, for once, the audience and critics agree. Just listen to the raves for America’s hottest TV genre:

“The country is gripped by misanthropy!”–New York Observer

“Ridiculous and pernicious! Many kinds of cruelty are passed off as entertainment!”–Washington Post

“So-called reality television just may be killing the medium!”–San Francisco Chronicle

O.K., we added the exclamation points, but you get the idea. Yes, viewers are tuning in to Joe Millionaire, The Bachelorette and American Idol by the tens of millions. Yet, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, never have so many watched so much TV with so little good to say about it.

Well, that ends here. It may ruin reality producers’ marketing plans for a TV critic to say it, but reality TV is, in fact, the best thing to happen to television in several years. It has given the networks water-cooler buzz again; it has reminded viewers jaded by sitcoms and dramas why TV can be exciting; and at its best, it is teaching TV a new way to tell involving human stories.

A few concessions up front. First, yes, we all know that there’s little reality in reality TV: those “intimate” dates, for instance, are staged in front of banks of cameras and sweltering floodlights. But it’s the only phrase we’ve got, and I’m sticking with it. Second, I don’t pretend to defend the indefensible: Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People isn’t getting any help from me. And finally, I realize that comparing even a well-made reality show with, say, The Simpsons is not merely comparing apples with oranges; it’s comparing onions with washing machines–no reality show can match the intelligence and layers of well-constructed fiction.

On a sheer ratings level, the latest wave of reality hits has worked a sea change for the networks. And it has put them back on the pop-cultural map after losing the buzz war to cable for years. Reality shows don’t just reach tens of millions of viewers but leave them feeling part of a communal experience–what network TV does best, but sitcoms and dramas haven’t done since Seinfeld and Twin Peaks. (When was the last time CSI made you call your best friend or holler back at your TV?) “Reality has proven that network television is still relevant,” says Mike Fleiss, creator of the Bachelor franchise.

This has sitcom and drama writers praying for the reality bust. “The networks only have so much time and resources,” says Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator of Gilmore Girls. “Rather than solely focusing on convincing the Olsen twins to allow themselves to be eaten by bears in prime time, I wish they would focus on coming up with something that would really last.” TV does seem to be in overkill mode, as the networks have signed up dozens of dating shows, talent searches and other voyeurfests. And like an overheated NASDAQ, the reality market is bound to correct. But unlike earlier TV reality booms, this one is supported by a large, young audience that grew up on MTV’s The Real World and considers reality as legitimate as dramas and sitcoms–and that, for now, prefers it.

And why not? It would be easier to bemoan reality shows’ crowding out sitcoms and dramas if the latter weren’t in such a rut. But the new network shows of fall 2002 were a creatively timid mass of remakes, bland family comedies and derivative cop dramas. Network executives dubbed them “comfort”–i.e., familiar and boring–TV. Whereas reality TV–call it “discomfort TV”–lives to rattle viewers’ cages. It provokes. It offends. But at least it’s trying to do something besides help you get to sleep. Some upcoming reality concepts are idealistic, like FX’s American Candidate, which aims to field a “people’s candidate” for President in 2004. Others are lowbrow, like ABC’s The Will (relatives battle for an inheritance), FOX’s Married by America (viewers vote to help pair up a bride and groom) and NBC’s Around the World in 80 Dates (American bachelor seeks mates around the world; after all, how better to improve America’s image than to send a stud to other countries to defile their women?). But all of them make you sit up and pay attention. “I like to make a show where people say, ‘You can’t put that on TV,'” says Fleiss. “Then I put it on TV.”

By and large, reality shows aren’t supplanting creative successes like 24 or Scrubs; they’re filling in for duds like Presidio Med and MDs. As NBC reality chief Jeff Gaspin says, “There is a little survival-of-the-fittest thing this ends up creating.” When sitcoms started cloning goofy suburban dads and quirky, pretty yuppies, we got The Osbournes. And now reality TV is becoming our source for involved stories about personal relationships. This used to be the stuff of dramas like the canceled Once and Again, until programmers began concentrating on series like CSI and Law & Order, which have characters as detailed and individuated as checkers pieces. By the time Survivor ends, you know its players better than you know Law & Order’s Detective Briscoe after 11 years. Likewise, the WB’s High School Reunion, which brings together classmates after 10 years, is really asking whether you’re doomed to live out your high school role–“the jock,” “the nerd” or whatnot–for life. Last fall two scripted shows, That Was Then and Do Over, asked the same question but with cardboard characters and silly premises involving time travel. They got canceled. High School Reunion got a second season.

In Britain, where reality has ruled Britannia’s (air)waves for years, TV writers are starting to learn from reality’s success. The sitcom The Office uses reality-TV techniques (jerky, handheld camera work, “confessional” interviews) to explore the petty politics of white-collar workers. Now airing on BBC America, it’s the best comedy to debut here this season, because its characters are the kind of hard-to-pigeonhole folks you find in life–or on reality TV. On Survivor and The Amazing Race, the gay men don’t drop Judy Garland references in every scene. MTV’s Making the Band 2–a kind of hip-hop American Idol–gave center stage to inner-city kids who would be portrayed as perps or victims on a cop drama.

But aesthetics aside, the case against reality TV is mainly moral–and there’s a point to it. It’s hard to defend the deception of Joe Millionaire–which set up 20 women to court construction worker Evan Marriott by telling them he was a multimillionaire–as hilarious as its fool’s-gold chase can be. Even the show’s Potemkin Croesus contends that producers hid the show’s premise from him until the last minute. “The day before I left for France, I signed confidentiality papers which said what the show was about,” Marriott tells TIME. “At that point, could I really back out?” Others are concerned about the message of meanness. “There’s a premium on the lowest common denominator of human relationships,” says James Steyer, author of The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media’s Effect on Our Children. “It’s often women degrading themselves. I don’t want my 9-year-old thinking that’s the way girls should behave.”

So The Bachelorette is not morally instructive for grade-schoolers. But wallowing in the weaknesses and failings of humanity is a trademark of satire–people accused Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain of being misanthropes too–and much reality TV is really satire boiled down to one extreme gesture. A great reality-TV concept takes some commonplace piety of polite society and gives it a wedgie. Companies value team spirit; Survivor says the team will screw you in the end. The cult of self-esteem says everybody is talented; American Idol’s Simon Cowell says to sit down and shut your pie hole. Romance and feminism say a man’s money shouldn’t matter; Joe Millionaire wagers $50 million that they’re wrong.

The social criticisms of reality TV rest on two assumptions: that millions of other people are being taken in by reality TV’s deceptions (which the critic himself–or herself–is able to see through) or are being led astray by its unsavory messages (to which the critic is immune). When a reality show depicts bad behavior, it’s immoral, misanthropic, sexist or sick. When The Sopranos does the same thing, it’s nuanced storytelling. We assume that viewers can empathize with Tony Soprano without wanting to be him; we assume they can maintain critical distance and perceive ironies between his words and the truth. Why? Because we assume that people who like The Sopranos are smarter, more mature–better–than people who like The Bachelorette.

And aren’t they? Isn’t there something simply wrong with people who enjoy entertainment that depends on ordinary people getting their heart broken, being told they can’t sing or getting played for fools? That’s the question behind the protest of CBS’s plans to make a real-life version of The Beverly Hillbillies with a poor rural family. Says Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, “If somebody had proposed, ‘Let’s go into the barrio in L.A. and find a family of immigrants and put them in a mansion, and won’t it be funny when they interview maids?’ then people could see that’s a step too far.” It’s hard to either defend or attack a show that doesn’t exist yet, but it’s also true that the original sitcom was far harder on Mr. Drysdale than the Clampetts. And on The Osbournes, Ozzy–another Beverly Hills fish out of water–was “humiliated” into becoming the most beloved dad in America.

Indeed, for all the talk about “humiliation TV,” what’s striking about most reality shows is how good humored and resilient most of the participants are: the American Idol rejectees stubbornly convinced of their own talent, the Fear Factor players walking away from vats of insects like Olympic champions. What finally bothers their detractors is, perhaps, not that these people are humiliated but that they are not. Embarrassment, these shows demonstrate, is survivable, even ignorable, and ignoring embarrassment is a skill we all could use. It is what you risk–like injury in a sport–in order to triumph. “What people are really responding to on these shows is people pursuing their dreams,” says American Candidate producer R.J. Cutler. A reality show with all humiliation and no triumph would be boring.

And at their best, the shows offer something else entirely. One of the most arresting moments this TV season came on American Idol, when a single mom and professional boxer from Detroit flunked her audition. The show went with her backstage, with her adorable young son, as she told her life story. Her husband, a corrections officer, was murdered a few years before. She had taken up boxing–her ring name is “Lady Tiger”–because you can’t raise a kid on waitress money. Her monologue went from defiance (“You’ll see my album. Lady Tiger don’t stop”) to despair (“You ain’t going nowhere in Detroit. Nowhere”) to dignified resolve for her son’s sake (“We’re never going to quit, are we, angel?”). It was a haunting slice of life, more authentic than any ER subplot.

Was Lady Tiger setting a bad example for her son on national TV? Or setting a good example by dreaming, persevering and being proud? American Idol didn’t say. It didn’t nudge us to laugh at her or prod us to cry for her. In about two minutes, it just told a quintessentially American story of ambition and desperation and shrinking options, and it left the judgment to us. That’s unsettling. That’s heartbreaking. And the reality is, that’s great TV. –Reported by Amy Lennard Goehner/New York, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Adam Pitluk/Dallas