COMMENTARY
Weeding through the fantasy world of reality TV
“Greed is good,” affirmed the big shot investor on prime-time TV. “We just have to figure out a way to be greedy together.”
That’s from “Shark Tank” this week, which I DVR’d at the suggestion of my favorite TV tipster. In case you’ve missed “Shark Tank” thus far (good move, I say), this is yet another business mogul “reality show” a la Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” in which, in this case, sharklike investors decide whether to sink their dough into some new business “opportunity” presented to them by someone who may or may not be a total crackpot.
The proclaimed moral superiority of business folks being greedy together came right at the beginning of the show, when an overly acquisitive fellow wanted $75,000 to sink into his personalized bobblehead business so that he could expand into shopping mall kiosks.
At the end of their increasingly nasty negotiations, I was instantly reminded why neither I nor anyone I know is a rich business entrepreneur in America.
As much as I invariably learn from my tipster’s suggestions, we have veered off the same course for a while now. She, for instance, is invariably in sync with all those Emmy voters who insist on giving statues to all those frantic couples in “The Amazing Race.” Me? Not so much, as the current saying goes.
“The Amazing Race” tends to remind me of everything I fear and loathe about travel (rather than all the things I love about it).
Courtesy of “Balloon Boy”—whose evidently unhinged father was once a temperamental “contestant” on “Wife Swap”— I’ve been thinking a lot about what we’ve laughingly learned to call Reality TV in America, where, as comedian Elayne Boosler pointed out to her “friends” on Facebook, reality is exactly what its contestants understand least.
I used to think it was just a fancy new variation on TV’s—and radio’s— truly ancient game show practice of proving that human dignity is the very first thing people will jettison just to get five minutes of broadcast time. On “Queen for a Day,” women would tell horrific tales of intimate brutality and ill fortune, just to wind up with a new washer and a fur stole from Dicker and Dicker of Beverly Hills. On Bud Collyer’s “Beat the Clock,” people would put on sneakers and perform the sort of complicated stunts and games that children wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole at a neighborhood birthday party.
So—I figured reductively—how different really are those hordes of reality show contestants now filling the airwaves (including one who claimed she was running for vice president on the strengths of her Alaska home’s proximity to Russia and her ability to dress a dead moose)?
Well, as the balloon boy family and Octomom, and Jon and Kate have successively revealed to us, we really do have a new pathological species of American now—people so highly evolved in their narcissism that they’ve lost all conception of the dignity of daily living.
The only reality shows I watch, frankly, are “Dancing With the Stars” (it’s a talent show really), “Survivor” and “Big Brother.” I can vigorously defend all three.
• “Dancing With the Stars” OK, they’re not “stars.” But I’d at least heard of Donny Osmond and Michael Irvin before the show. And, let’s face it, the show is all about hard work— which dancing is. Then it’s about sublimated hoochie coochie and voting. You watch other people sweat a lot so that they can bump and grind for a few minutes while women wear incredibly sexy costumes. And then the judges get picky, and Tom Bergeron bats wisecracks back at them. Great junk television— the equivalent of a delicious, dripping chili dog.
• “Survivor” The one, the only, the original. The games are “Beat the Clock” times 100. They invariably remind me of everything I hated about summer camp. (Not only that. On the latest show, a guy named Russell conked his noggin and even supposedly worried unflappable host Jeff Probst, he of the resolute jaw line.) But the conniving remains delightfully ugly. Social exile is the show’s essence—all of it married to a pseudo-Darwinian setting away from civilization where a flock of camera and sound technicians and medical people watch contestants pretend to struggle with deprivation. Brilliant capitalist allegory. But not nearly as much as . . .
• “Big Brother” So help me, the greatest of them all. Its essential idea is this: Now that “reality TV” has allowed American Narcissists of dubious stability to slither out of the woodwork in huge numbers, the real horror for them to cope with isn’t “Survivor’s” rain storms or insects, it’s each other.
Just lock ’em up together and film every move, and you’ll get furtive sex, explosions of temper and acres of brazenly bad behavior, all for fame’s sake. Granted that their “fame” is strongest among other members of their scarily evolved species (where “playing the game” means lying, conniving and backstabbing). In a virtual age, we’re watching virtual humans on TV in virtual contexts, all as allegories of the modern workplace. (Tune in every week to see who was “downsized.”) Brilliant TV, masquerading as garbage.
What was most fascinating about the balloon family is that, after Jon and Kate and Octomom, so many putatively “legit” news organizations got hornswoggled that we now have a brand new kind of reality TV—days and maybe weeks on end of journalists complaining that the new viral TV narcissism has infected their supposedly pristine news processes.
Call it virtual indignation. And, by all means, tune in tomorrow to see if charges have been filed.
After all, greed is good, as long as people can be greedy together.
Right?
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