Reality REALLY Bites

Just another day at the office at the WWE, which bears great responsibility for the scourge of reality television.

Ah, the realm of movable printed (or virtual) type. The blogosphere. The only place other than (insert government bureaucracy here) where everyone is so right and so wrong at the same time. It’s great to be here on Inebriated Discourse.com with my buddies Max and Wolf. I really appreciated the introduction I got from Max for my first submission. It felt like a strong endorsement, although not the ideal intro I was hoping for. I’ve always wanted my introduction to be scripted by Vince McMahon. Say some jackass on a rival “I write while I’m baked” blog starts ripping free speech or wants to end women’s suffrage. He’ll be talking all this shit on YouTube or something, then out of nowhere I come flying in and deck him over the head with the ring bell! Jim Ross would be screaming, “Good God Almighty! Who the hell is this?! This is a HEINOUS attack!” I’d drop a Hogan leg drop across his chest and my music would start playing while everyone went nuts in their cubicles and dorm rooms. I’ve still got the styrofoam Intercontinental Championship belt from like 1992. Don’t think I won’t bust that thing out.

My whole WWF fantasy got me thinking about how much “sports entertainment” has impacted my life. I still call it WWF too, because WWE still doesn‘t sound right. I had mentioned I still have some paraphernalia, and I still watch from time to time when there’s nothing else on. It’s nostalgic. I still occasionally pretend to kick my buddies in the gut and give them Stone Cold Stunners. I had Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase’s entrance theme as my ringtone for awhile. In the 90’s I used to follow this shit religiously. People called it a “soap opera for men.” Essentially it was, but there’s a much better analogy that led me to realize that something I’d loved may be the inspiration to the current bane of my existence. WWF is responsible for awful reality television.

Now, by awful reality television I mean all reality television. I am, however, excluding Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers because they contain little if any douchebaggery and are somewhat educational, therefore making them almost anti-reality TV. Reality shows are actually manufactured to eliminate previously attained knowledge. It’s like chomping ten Klonopins; your mind is being obliterated. I finally understand how my mom felt when she would catch me leaping off the back of the couch to drop an elbow on my Bret Hart Wrestling Buddy. The only thought entering my mind when VH1 is on is, “How can you watch this shit?”

These two entities rope their fans in with the same simple element: conflict. While pro wrestling lures in teenage males with violence, borderline profanity and scantily-clad women, reality shows will hook their female counterparts with chicks yelling at each other, talking about their feelings, crying on the phone with their head in their hands, and faggy blowouts wearing headbands and tight-ass, sleeveless shirts from Express For Men. You can’t blame them for trying to roll everything their main demographic desires into a single weekly show; it just makes sense. The problem is, there are only two wrestling companies. There are like 200 shitty reality shows. Wrestling shows are on once a week, live, with the closest thing to a repeat being a recap show. Fucking Jersey Shore is on all god damn day! And if it’s not that, it’s Teen Mom, or 16 and Pregnant, or Dumb Twats Club, or True Life: I’m The Reason The World Hates America.

Cable television has been invaded by reality shows depicting supposed normal shit for certain people. If you’re looking for reality, why don’t you walk out your door and into oncoming traffic. That ought to “real” things up for you. These people aren’t acting normal, they play for the camera. Most of them are hoping for landing an acting gig or recording a cookie-cutter pop album hoping for a quick payday and their fifteen minutes. They’re not real! Why else would they have names like Snooki and The Situation? These even sound like wrestling names! It’s completely fake and all its biggest fans think its real, while outsiders question their mindset and proclaim the truth, “Why are you watching that crap, its not even real!” The fans always reply, “Yes it is! I love this show! You watch, someday, I’m gonna be the BIGGEST loser on The Biggest Loser!”

This epidemic has destroyed TV as we know it. I’m sure you’ve seen previews for new shows and pilots coming out. How many of them have you thinking, “Hey, that show looks pretty good, I could get into that.” I’m sure it’s a number between zero and….well….uhh….probably just zero. As long as these networks keep pumping out the same friggin’ show with a different name every few months, I’m going to boycott them the best way I know how. By suplexing my pillows off the coffee table and illegally downloading Rocko’s Modern Life episodes. Now that is some fucking entertainment!

- Xavier MacTavish

Reality TV Is A Sinister Enterprise

Douchebag Jon Gosselin is wanted for contributing to the delinquency of America.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, “reality” television started to take off. Of course, the name for these kinds of shows was a total misnomer. Indeed, what’s so “realistic” about a scenario where a bunch of strangers are purposely plopped down in some remote area of the world where they suddenly have to figure out how to hunt, make fire, and conspire against each other to win $1 million via a series of votes? The success of Survivor and other shows appeared to be thanks to their unusual premises and situations, which seemed to put the contestants under immense strain. My own dislike of all “reality” television notwithstanding, these shows seemed to make interesting TV for millions of Americans.

But then something strange happened. Almost counterintuitively, reality television did not get more far-fetched and outrageous. Instead, it got more real, more banal and everyday. And then something even stranger happened. These shows were also popular, and their “stars” became instant celebrities. Whereas shows such as Survivor and The Amazing Race still sell with their unusual plot lines, there are an increasing number of shows whose success defies explanation.

Take Jon and Kate Plus 8, whose premise was simply, “We have a lot of kids.” Producers were able to squeeze out 112 episodes about the couple’s daily struggle to raise these children. One hundred twelve shows. That’s sixty-six hours of “coverage” of a wife and husband whose only claim to fame is, to repeat, “We have a lot of kids.” One would think that the audience might tire of this after thirty, sixty, or ninety minutes, because it really doesn’t take long to realize that if a couple has eight kids, their lives are pretty much fucked. As Thoreau once queried about the gossip-mongers of his time, “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?” Indeed, we get it. Having eight kids sucks. Now move on.

Or how about any of the Real Housewives of… series? Those shows basically consist of rich, scheming, bitchy gold-diggers who are some of the shallowest human beings who have ever walked the Earth. Most of them have no depth whatsoever, and yet for millions of perhaps equally shallow Americans, these vixens make for riveting television.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the runaway popularity of these shows, is the viability of two other shows which particularly stand out for their portrayal of people with social stigmas. The first is TLC’s Little People, Big World, which according to Wikipedia, “follows the six-member Roloff family farm near Portland, Oregon. Many of the episodes focus on the parents, Matt and Amy, and one of their sons, Zach, who all have dwarfism.” The second, is NBC’s The Biggest Loser, which “centers around overweight contestants attempting to lose weight to fight for a cash prize.”

Do these two shows remind anyone else of P.T. Barnum’s nineteenth century “sideshows?” Recall that Barnum’s circuses would often feature dwarves and extremely obese individuals who were put on exhibition for the curious masses who would pay to see these “wonders”—these poor bastards with obvious and handicapping stigmas which made it all but impossible for them to lead “normal” lives, and so many of them ended up selling their dignity for the pennies that Barnum tossed their way.

That grotesque principle is exactly what is at work in these shows. All of them. Not just the ones about dwarves and fatties. Notice that the documentary-style reality television shows almost always feature people who have some deficiency or problem that distinguishes them from “normal” people. With Jon and Kate, it was all those kids. Be glad you don’t have eight children. With Real Housewives, it’s all the conniving amongst so-called friends. Be glad you don’t have friends that stab you in the back like that. With Little People, Big World, it’s the disabling lack of height. Be glad you’re not that short. And with The Biggest Loser, it’s all that extra weight. Be glad you’re not that fat.

Taken all together, reality television is trying to tell us something sinister: Be content. Watch these shows and thank the heavens that you’re probably not like any of these people. Don’t complain. It could be worse. Watch and feel better about yourself. Fill that void you so clearly have in your life with this vacuous nonsense. It feels good. It’s a little holiday from all of your troubles and all of your cares. Be content! And don’t forget to buy the shit advertised in the commercials.

It’s no wonder we’re fucked as a nation.

- Max