If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be 90 minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat and steal—and your job is to do the show.
After that meeting, Michaels was so dispirited that he quit SNL and didn’t return to series television for four years. Since then, of course, with the rise of reality TV, the constant digging to find the lowest common denominator has reached fracking depths.
In 2008, at reality TV’s peak of popularity, the producers of the Emmy Awards made spitting on scriptwriters the theme of the telecast. The awards for writing were relegated to the off-camera preshow ceremony while they added an award for Best Reality Show Host and even let the Emmy telecast itself be emceed by five reality hosts who were given ten minutes on live TV with no prepared material. That night, we discovered why cue cards are sometimes called “idiot cards.” That telecast could have been repackaged as a reality show called “Prime Time’s Deadliest Train Wrecks.” But it did go down in history by chalking up the lowest Emmy rating ever and landing a spot on the TV Guide Network’s 25 Biggest TV Blunders special, which I’ll bet had a script created by professional writers.
Reality TV wasn’t always the celebration of lust, greed, pride, envy, wrath, sloth, and gluttony (and let’s toss in stupidity and drunkenness, just to be thorough) that it is today. Its birth is usually traced back to the 1973 PBS series, An American Family, in which the upper-middle-class Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, allowed a TV documentary crew to move into their home and film their everyday lives. It became a cultural phenomenon when the cameras caught such intimate, never-before-seen-on-TV moments as the parents’ marriage falling apart, their subsequent divorce, and their eldest son Lance coming out as gay.
But it sparked a backlash, with the Loud family complaining that the three hundred hours of video footage had been deliberately edited to create a negative impression of them. Critics also questioned whether the presence of the cameras and the pressures of the media fame that came along with them might have contributed to the family’s dissolution, becoming not just a passive observer but an active force in distorting and destroying the family’s lives. This was also the theme of Albert Brooks’s satire, Real Life. It’s since become one of the chief criticisms of all “reality TV” shows: that the presence of the cameras and the cast’s knowledge that they’re being filmed insures that what you are seeing isn’t real. Social scientists call this the Hawthorne effect, when a behavioral experiment is worthless because people under observation behave differently if they know they’re being observed.
Jump forward to 1992, and the premiere of what’s generally considered the first reality-TV series as we now know them, MTV’s The Real World. It was a show that followed a group of young people of widely varying backgrounds and personalities, chosen by the producers to share an apartment in a particular city. The cameras caught their struggles to find their places in the world, as well as to get along with their telegenically diverse roomies. At least, those were the original lofty ambitions that MTV trumpeted.
The show at first garnered praise for its frank discussions of drugs, sexuality, AIDS, abortion, politics, racial prejudice, and other hot-button issues. And the cast members generally came across as decent, thoughtful young people. But the show’s success attracted thousands of attention-craving applicants who realized it was no longer necessary to possess any actual talent or wit to become a celebrity. Willingness to be an obnoxious jerk on TV had suddenly become a golden ticket to fame and fortune.
Despite cast members’ claims that they were unaffected by the cameras, it wasn’t long before The Real World was less connected to reality than the cartoon series, The Real Ghostbusters. Some roommates went public with complaints that they had to stage phony arguments and outrageous antics to spark ratings-generating controversy. After about twenty years, the format eventually degenerated into MTV’s ultimate celebration of drunken hedonism, Jersey Shore.
The next big boosts to reality TV came with the introductions of Big Brother and Survivor, two shows that, like ABBA music and smallpox, originated in Europe (Big Brother in the Netherlands in 1999, and Survivor in Sweden in 1997), then spread worldwide, with local versions in many different countries.
Big Brother was essentially The Real World minus the youth and the world, as a group of obnoxious attention junkies, some of whom should have been old enough to know better, were locked together in a house full of cameras that recorded their petty battles and illicit couplings the way scientists might observe the breakdown into fornicating and cannibalism of an overpopulated rat colony.
Survivor seemed to have higher ambitions, but was basically Big Brother on a desert island. Imagine Gilligan’s Island, if the castaways had been the aforementioned cannibalistic rats. Or Robinson Crusoe, if Crusoe had spent 90 percent of his time on the island scheming how to double-cross his sidekick, Friday. The show was immensely popular, with the selling point being the educational adventure of watching humans struggling to survive a hostile environment with only the barest of necessities (the fact that many of the female contestants were attractive women whose barest necessities included tiny bikinis also didn’t hurt the ratings, and likely helped inspire the Discovery Channel to take it one step further with Naked and Afraid). From the very first season, it became apparent that the real key to winning on Survivor wasn’t knowing Boy Scout skills, like how to build a fire or spear a fish, but knowing how to burn and backstab your fellow castaways. It hardly came as a surprise that the very first Survivor winner, Richard Hatch, later went to prison twice for scheming to evade taxes. How’s that for a dose of reality?
The success of Survivor and Big Brother opened the floodgates—or more accurately, the sewer pipes—and soon, television was awash in allegedly unscripted reality shows, glorifying unknown no-talents who were trying to outdo one another in selfish, gross, antisocial behavior. Ironically, even as these shows decimated the market for quality scripted dramas, they trumpeted that they offered up plenty of “drama”—only in the case of shows such as the various incarnations of Real Housewives, “drama” was defined as egocentric, diva-like behavior that usually ended with a drink thrown in someone’s face.
Scripted soap opera–style dramas such as Dallas and Melrose Place looked like the works of Shakespeare compared to the reality versions that replaced them, such as Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County and The Hills. Traditional game shows that tested people’s knowledge were shoved aside by gross and/or mean-spirited, reality-based variations, such as Fear Factor, Weakest Link, Married by America (contestants agreed to marry a stranger selected by viewers), The Swan (“ugly ducklings” battled to win a complete plastic surgery makeover), Who’s Your Daddy (adoptees competed to guess which contestant was their birth father and which was lying to win prizes), and Temptation Island (couples were transported to a tropical island and separated, and hot singles of the opposite sex competed to entice them into cheating on each other). As Ron Burgundy would say, “Stay classy!”
We used to think The Dating Game was too risqué for kids. But after eighteen seasons of The Bachelor, we now have a whole generation that was brought up thinking true love is something an oversexed hound finds by seducing a harem of scheming women in a hot tub of questionable hygiene. Cooking shows in which the worst violence was Julia Child boning a pheasant were replaced with shows like Hell’s Kitchen, featuring amateur cooks stabbing each other in the back with salad forks as red-faced British chefs screamed profanity at them. (Perhaps because of Simon Cowell, all reality competition shows require a nasty Brit; but why anyone would consider a British chef to be th
e ultimate culinary authority is an eternal mystery.) There were also food shows featuring globe-trotting hosts scouring the world to uncover the most disgusting things and see if they could swallow them without vomiting. (Now, there’s a perfect metaphor for reality TV!)
Then there were the celebrity reality shows, featuring people famous solely for being famous (Paris Hilton, the Kardashians) or talented celebrities a bit past their prime, like Joan Rivers, Lindsay Lohan, and the Osbournes, whose constant cursing and floors covered with dog droppings earned them high ratings, magazine covers, an invitation to the 2002 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and accolades as the new face of the American family. I can safely state they were nothing like my family, where both potty mouths and dirty floors got washed out with soap, and both the dogs and the kids were house-trained.
By now, you may be wondering why I went to all the trouble of tracing the birth and long downward spiral of reality TV. It’s because like anything else in the mass media that’s wildly popular, it’s had an effect on society in general. Along with its attention-mongering, privacy-destroying, do-it-yourself cousin, online social media, it’s been a particularly negative influence on impressionable young people.
Many of these so-called reality shows have been plagued by the same complaints: Cast members are secretly given scripts or at least “directed” to say and do certain things; shows are misleadingly edited to create heroes, villains, and conflict; they glorify and promote shallow, irresponsible behavior, such as promiscuity, exhibitionism, conspicuous consumption, substance abuse, violence, and mindless partying; they cruelly exploit people who don’t realize they’re being mocked (Anna Nicole Smith); they’ve eradicated the concepts of privacy and modesty; and by making instant celebrities out of no-talent attention addicts, they teach young viewers that fame is the highest goal you can aspire to, and that vulgarity and voyeurism, not talent, training, or hard work, are the easiest ways to achieve it.
The results of their mass-media “education” can be seen in a 2007 Pew Research survey of Millennials, age eighteen to twenty-five. It found that many young people’s values had been so distorted that they resembled a TV Guide synopsis of a typical reality show. Asked what their most important goals in life were, eight out of ten young Americans said that getting rich was the most or second-most important goal in life. About half said that being famous was also a top priority. Large majorities believed that casual sex, binge drinking, illegal drug use, and violence were more common among youth now than twenty years before. And their constant posting of photos and updates about themselves to social network sites inspired the pollsters to dub them not the “Me” Generation but the “Look at Me” Generation.
These depressing findings were backed up by a 2013 survey by UCLA’s Children’s Digital Media Center. It focused on even younger Americans, age nine to fifteen. A full one-third of them said that being famous was somewhat important, important, or very important. Even among the very youngest, those under age thirteen, 23 percent were on a social networking site and 26 percent had their own YouTube accounts.
One child psychologist said it’s nothing new: Kids have always had dreams of becoming famous. But what is new is that the Internet now gives them the opportunity to imitate the trappings of fame by posting their photos, videos, and personal information in front of the whole world. When you add that they’ve been taught by reality TV that the key to grabbing the world’s attention is obnoxious, dangerous, antisocial behavior, you have a recipe for disaster.
A perfect example is Buckwild, a reality show about the self-destructive redneck antics of a group of nine young people in Charleston, West Virginia. It briefly took over Jersey Shore’s time slot, but proved to be too irresponsible even for MTV. It was canceled after just one season, during which various cast members were arrested on drug, DUI, and other charges, and young cast member Shain Gandee, his uncle, and another man were found dead. They’d gone off-roading in deep mud, which covered the tailpipe of their Ford Bronco and resulted in lethal carbon monoxide poisoning.
On December 7, 2012, before Buckwild had even premiered, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin wrote a letter to the president of MTV requesting that it be canceled. Senator Manchin wrote, “This show plays to ugly, inaccurate stereotypes about the people of West Virginia … You preyed on young people, coaxed them into displaying shameful behavior—and now you are profiting from it. That is just wrong.” All it had taken to repulse him was MTV’s two-minute advance trailer featuring highlights—or more precisely, lowlights—of the upcoming series. Just two minutes from introduction to repulsion to calls for cancellation. That might be a new world record, even for a reality show!
To be fair, there have been some reality shows that aimed to educate viewers about something they might not otherwise have encountered. Many focus on people with unusual or dangerous occupations, such as Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, and the granddaddy of them all, Cops. Time magazine critic James Poniewozik noted that TV used to be filled with scripted shows about the type of blue-collar workers who make America run; but in the nineties, as the networks began chasing yuppie viewers with large disposable incomes, reality TV became the only place where viewers could learn about the lives of anyone other than attractive young urbanites working at hip lifestyle magazines and hanging out together at coffee houses.
Unfortunately, as I’ve already noted, what they learned from reality TV about people outside big cities is mostly a load of ugly, exaggerated, and downright false stereotypes. Shows about the tough, respectable jobs of fishermen and truckers quickly devolved into shows set in tattoo parlors and pawn shops, then into the condescending mockery of rural Southerners, as seen in Buckwild and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
Despite its popularity, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has come in for sharp criticism for the producers’ transparent attempts to depict the Thompson family as, to quote a reviewer for Forbes, “a horde of lice-picking, lard-eating, nose-thumbing hooligans south of the Mason-Dixon Line.” Great Britain’s Guardian newspaper noted the disconnect between the show’s not-so-subtle attempts to “point and snicker” at the family, and the female family members, who stubbornly refuse “to hate themselves for their poverty, their weight, their less-than-urbane lifestyle, or the ways in which they diverge from the socially-acceptable beauty standard.”
I suspect that a similar condescending attitude toward rural Southerners might have originally been behind the greenlighting of the A&E reality series, Duck Dynasty. But for once, the typical reality show story took a surprise twist. Who could have predicted that audiences wouldn’t look down on and ridicule the tight-knit Robertson family of Louisiana, owners of a successful family business making duck calls and other hunting equipment? Instead, they embraced the Robertsons for their solid family values, their patriotism and love of the great outdoors, their work ethic, their common sense, and their unshakable, unapologetic Christian faith. Finally, there was a family on TV that actually resembled us! Well, us and ZZ Top. Duck Dynasty is a refreshing brand of reality TV, not because it’s sophisticated or truly unscripted reality, but because it at least reflects and encourages the kind of wholesomeness that is all too rare on TV and for that matter, getting more rare in our communities. I think of it as The Waltons with beards and a more decidedly and unapologetic Christian faith.
Duck Dynasty fans don’t mock the Robertsons; they want to emulate them. According to Forbes, as of the third quarter of 2013, the show had sold $400 million worth of merchandise and generated $80 million in ad income for A&E. The show’s fourth season premiere drew 11.8 million viewers, beating the major network competition and breaking the record as the most-watched nonfiction cable series episode in history.
In another departure from the sordid and sleazy, TLC’s hit show 19 Kids and Counting features the real-life Duggar family of Springdale, Arkansas. Jim Bob (yes, that’s his real name) and Michelle are cherished personal friends of mine. Jim Bob was in the state legislature during my tenure as governor,
and he and Michelle and their very large brood of children really are amazing people.
Like the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame, the Duggars reflect all that is good and decent about family. They pray, go to church (and not just for TV), they work hard, they don’t take handouts to care for their large number of children, but instead truly model the behavior of a family who helps each other, respects each other, and loves each other and whose entire family revolves around their deep and authentic Christian faith.
Jim Bob is a self-made millionaire, having dabbled in real estate and selling cars and being blessed by being very good at figuring out what would make money. He and Michelle believe that their primary role in life is to create the next generation (some might think they single-handedly will do so by themselves) and train them to be their replacements. I’ve known this family since the kids were little and back when there were only four or five of them, if that. I’ve marveled at the exemplary manners and behavior of all of their children. They are every parent’s dream in their attitudes toward each other, their parents, and their chores. They have endured relentless and vicious ridicule from the snobby and snotty sophisticates who exemplify their own jealousy of how well behaved the Duggar kids are compared to the little hellions and yuppie larvae created by the critics of the Duggars.
If all reality TV were the Robertsons and Duggars, I’d say, “bring more of it!” It would be like “Father Knows Best with Beards” or “Leave It to Beaver and His 18 Brothers and Sisters.” Unfortunately, for every Duck Dynasty and Duggar show, we get fifty dumpster-diving, snuff-dipping, knuckle-dragging dopes.
Excuse me while I change the channel and catch a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies.
God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 15