journal

Mark Greif

The Reality of Reality Television

There is a persistent dream that television will be more than it is: that it will not only sit in every

home, but make a conduit for those homes to reach back to a shared fund of life.

The utopia of television nearly came within reach in 1992, on the day cable providers announced

that cable boxes would expand to 500 channels. Back then, our utopian idea rested on

assumptions both right and wrong. We assumed network-sized broadcasters could never afford

new programming for so many active channels. That was right. We also assumed TV subscribers

wouldn’t stand for 500 channels of identical fluff, network reruns, syndicated programs, second-

run movies, infomercials, and home shopping. That was wrong.

We were sure the abundance of channels would bring on stations of pure environmental

happiness, carrying into our homes the comforts everyone craves: the 24-hour Puppy Channel,

the Sky Channel, the Ocean Channel, the Baby Channel—showing nothing but frolicsome

puppies, placid sky, tumultuous ocean, and big-headed babies. It never happened. And yet cable

TV did indeed get cut up for small pleasures, in the advertisement of more utilitarian interests, on

the Food Network, the InStyle Network, and Home and Garden Television (HGTV).(Natural

beauty took hold on cable only in the pious slideshows of the Christian channels, where

Yosemite is subtitled by 1st Corinthians.)

The meaningful history of technology turns out to be a history of its fantasized uses as much as

of the shapes it actually takes. Our cable-box dreams finally rested on one beautiful notion: the

participatory broadcasting of real life. With such a ludicrous number of channels, companies

would just have to give some of the dial over to the rest of us, the viewers—wouldn’t they? And

we millions would flow into the vacuum of content. We’d manifest our nature on channels 401

to 499 as surely as do puppies, ocean, and sky. We’d do it marrying, arguing, staring at the wall,

dining, studying our feet, holding contests, singing, sneezing. Hundreds of thousands of us had

cameras. Well, we’d plug them in and leave the tape running for our real life.

In this underlying dream, we were neither exactly wrong nor right. The promise of the 500

channels went to waste. The techno-utopians’ fantasies shifted to the internet. Nothing like the

paradise we hoped for came to fruition on TV, that’s for sure. Instead we got reality TV.

The assessment of reality television depends first on your notion of television; second, on your

idea of political community.

Here is a standard misconception: since the noblest forms of artistic endeavor are fictional and

dramatic (the novel, film, painting, plays), it can be assumed that the major, proper products of

television will be its dramatic entertainments, the sitcom and the hour-long drama. I think this is

wrong, and very possibly wrong for a whole number of reasons. Drama has a different meaning

in a commercial medium where “programming” came into being as bacon to wrap the real

morsels of steak, the 90-second advertisements. It means something different when it exists in a

medium we switch on to see “what’s on TV” rather than to find a given single work; when the

goal is more often to watch television than to watch a particular drama and then turn it off.

From its beginnings in the early 1950s, TV has been blamed for encouraging over-individualism,

for hastening consumer suckerdom, for spurring passivity and couch-potatoness, and for making

up the sensational bread-and-circuses of mass-culture tyranny. That pretty much covers it. And

yet when opponents tried to divide the wretched things flickering inside the idiot-box into

categories, they made excuses for quite unnecessary forms that they felt they recognized

(highbrow TV dramas) while deriding unique and far more important items that didn’t suit their

vision of dramatic art (game shows, local news, now reality shows).

The real principled problem ought to be with drama. The modern form of the longstanding

Western philosophical argument against placing drama at the center of a republic was articulated

twenty years before the American Revolution. Rousseau insisted in his Letter to M. D’Alembert

that a republic (in his case Geneva, circa 1758) was correct to keep a theater out of its public life.

To Rousseau, a republic is a political community in which each person is equal and sovereign—

as it should be to us, today, living in the American republic. The citizen is not sovereign alone,

but sovereign through his activity in a community of peers. The drama, when it was given too

much power, crowded out the true entertainments of any republican political community—

entertainments whose delights must be rooted in that self-regard and free judgment in daily

activity which strengthens the bonds of citizen to citizen. (Bear in mind that Rousseau, in ancient

régime Paris, loved the theater: “Racine charms me and I have never willingly missed a

performance of Molière.” A corrupt order, of nobility and monarchy, could hardly be made

worse by drama and might be made better. But the philosopher loved a republic more.)

Rousseau expected that a republic’s civic entertainments would be displays of what people

already do. Singing, building, decorating, beauty, athletics, and dancing gave pleasure and

“entertainment” because the participants not only accomplished the acts but became spectacles to

themselves—and to others, their equals and fellow-citizens, who had done just the same

activities. Republican entertainments might often take the form of the contest or the

demonstration. But they might also be the special celebration of ordinary living itself—the

“festival”:

Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there,

and you will have a festival. Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to

themselves; let them become actors themselves; do it so each sees and loves himself in the others

so that all will be better united.

“Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves”: a part of TV has always done this.

It has meant, at different times, local programming, Huntley and Brinkley, the national news at 6

and local news at 11, talk shows and talent shows, This is Your Life and the regional tours of

Wheel of Fortune. Accept, though, that television’s most important function might always have

been to let citizens see each other and be seen in their representatives—in our only truly national

universal medium—and you’re left to ask what will accomplish it best today. Reality television

may furnish its dark apotheosis—a form for an era in which local TV has been consolidated out

of existence, regional differences are said to be diminishing (or anyway are less frequently

represented), and news, increasingly at the service of sales departments, has forfeited its

authority to represent the polity.

We need myths, not only of our ideal, and our average, but of our fallen extreme. Since the

establishment of informed-consent rules in the 1970s, the golden age of social psychology is

gone. No more Stanley Milgram’s proof that ordinary citizens will push the voltage to the red

zone while the electrocuted actor screams—so long as a lab-coated tester is there to give the

orders. No more Philip Zimbardo’s proof that fake guards will brutalize fake prisoners if you

arbitrarily split Stanford students into two groups, lock them in a basement, and leave them to

their own devices. No more Harold Garfinkel’s demonstrations that testers can drive strangers

berserk if they stare at other riders on the elevator or if children refuse to recognize their parents.

Today we are reliant on Elimidate, Punk’d, and Survivor. Watching reality television is like

walking one long hallway of an unscrupulous and peculiarly indefatigable psychology

department.

The first ideal-type of reality TV is the show of the pure event. Cops represents one end of its

spectrum, the low-budget dating shows (Blind Date, Elimidate, Fifth Wheel, Xtreme Dating) the

other. You discern patterns in each—the effect on the watchful viewer is of a patterned repetition

of wholly singular encounters. In the endless scenes of arrests, traffic stops, drive-by warnings

(“OK, you ain’t going to do it again”), domestic disturbances, and interviews with complainants

(“Calm down, ma’am, just tell me what happened”), it becomes clear that justice, at the level of

the arrest, has less to do than you might have thought with the code of law. Between cop and

civilian, everything is determined by personality; each word is a step in a negotiation; the tools

each side possesses seem arbitrary and confused, in the wheedling or vagueness of the suspect,

the mock-authoritativeness and lack of information of the cop. So you make notes to your

criminal self: never voluntarily submit to a search. But it doesn’t take long to realize that, in the

situation, you wouldn’t remember all you’d learned watching Cops; politeness and hustling

would take over. In the immediate interaction between two people, each staring into the other’s

eyes and trying to persuade him toward escape or incrimination, drugged by fear when not hazy

with narcotics, you see the hidden face-to-face interactions of your countrymen.

And on Blind Date and Xtreme Dating and Fifth Wheel, with wary daters eyeing each other over

pasta dinners, leglessly drunk in a hundred indistinguishable neon dives and, afterwards, on the

best dates, mumbling vulgar blandishments in hot tubs, you see that romance is not angelic

recognition nor simple animal lust but a negotiation—the same as in the Cops arrest. The blind

date and the traffic stop become on late-night TV the two paradigmatic experiences of American

encounters between strangers. Homogenous America is instantly disproved by bizarre America.

It is reassuring to watch this openness and fumbling. Finally you see without intermediary

dramatization the landscape of tanning salons and restaurants and aikido studios in every corner

of the country, the still-distinct accents but universalized, television-influenced behaviors, the

dilemma of what to say and which personality to project, as if the social relation were being

rebuilt, in a cutaway scale model of our society—a great televised Ark of a changing

civilization—two by two.

So even though evidently all women look for “sense of humor” and all men want someone “I can

have fun with,” even though all good girls say they are “wild” and all good boys avow that they

are “players,” this has only an equivocal effect on individuals’ relentlessly erroneous attempts to

approximate trends and manners learned from TV, which seems to be what’s really going on.

Yoyoing modesty and immodesty (“I’m a bad girl. I mean, I’m mostly bad in bed”); frank talk

about penis size and boob jobs but wildly variable estimates on the morality of kissing on a first

date; shy clumsiness masked under pornographic aspirations (“Have you ever had a threesome?”

“No, that’s more like, a goal of mine”)—this, the cameras prove, is the current American

performing-reality. Everyone tries to play someone else on TV, but still feels so many tethering

strings from the prosaic, deficient, and plain polite that conformity becomes chaotic and

imitation idiosyncratic.

“Voyeurism” was never the right word for what it means to watch these shows. You feel some

identification with the participants, and even more sympathy with the situation. “And if I were

pulled over—and if I were set up on a blind date—how would I fare?” But primarily, and this is

the more important thing to say about reality TV, there is always judgment. You can’t know the

deeds your countrymen will do until you see them; and once these deeds are seen, you won’t fail

to judge and retell them. Reality TV is related in this respect to the demimonde of The People’s

Court, Divorce Court, Judge Hatchett,and Judge Judy. Classy critics hate these shows too, or

claim to. I think that’s a mistake. The way in which all reality TV—and much of daytime TV—

can be “real” across social classes is in its capacity for judgment. The “friends” on Friends were

an ideological group, propagandists for a bland class of the rich in a sibling-incest sitcom. The

show didn’t allow you to take their idiocy to task, nor ever to question the details of how they

paid their rent or their hairdresser’s bill, or how they acted on the “outside.” If only Judge Judy

could sit in judgment of them, once! If only Cops would break down their door and throw them

against the wall! Monica, you ignorant Skeletor, eat a sandwich! Ross, you vainglorious

paleontologist, read a book! You mortuary creep! Truly, the judge shows have a vengeful appeal:

they gather every inept, chiseling, weaseling, self-focused sort of person you meet in your daily

life and, counting on each one’s stupidity and vanity to get him up into the dock, they yell at him.

This is one way to come to terms with your fellow citizens. Much reality TV, by contrast,

communicates a relative openness of judgment, though judgment is its one constant—and does

so also by its wider identity of situation between the viewer and those before the cameras.

(Nearly everybody has dated, and, from rich to poor, nearly everybody fears the police when

driving and will call on them when threatened.) Reality TV’s judgment falls on “another

oneself,” however much one retains the right to disown and ridicule this nitwitted fellow-citizen.

Nowadays, at every level of our society, there is a hunger for judgment. Often this becomes

summary judgment—not so much the wish to know the truth, but the brutal decisionism that

would rather be wrong than stay in suspension. This is the will not to deliberate but to sentence.

In the political realm, it has influenced the shape of the current disaster. Its soft manifestations

own the therapeutic talk shows, in the sniffling and nose wiping of a Dr. Phil, where the expert is

never at a loss. He will not say: “No, your situation is too messed up for me to advise you; I have

a similar problem; think for yourself.” Whereas the cheapest and rawest reality TV offers you a

chance to judge people like you, people who do lots of the same things you do. It is cheap, it is

amoral, it has no veneer of virtue, it is widely censured and a guilty pleasure, and it can be more

educational and truthful and American than most anything else, very suitable for our great

republic.

Until, that is, one began to see what the capital-rich networks would make of it. For they got into

the act, like dinosaurs in an inland sea, and they made the waters heave. They developed the

grandiose second ideal-type of filmed reality, courtesy of bigger budgets and serial episodes: the

show of the group microcosm.

The microcosms were large-scale endeavors, financed by FOX, MTV, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the

WB. (The other shows had been cheaply made and served up to UHF and low-budget cable

stations by syndication, or, like Cops, run in the early barebones years of FOX and retained.)

MTV’s The Real World, which put teens in a group house with cameras, was the earliest and

most incomplete example. The pun in its “real world” title meant both that you would see how

non-actors interacted (initially fascinating) and that this was, for many of the children on the

show, their first foray away from home (pretty boring, after the umpteenth homesick phone call).

MTV’s goal was to make up a “generation,” not a society, as MTV is the most aggressive

promoter of one version of youth as a wholesale replacement of adult life.

Subsequently the broadcast networks converted the dating “event” show into sagas of thirty

suitors, peeling them away one by one until only the chosen bride or groom remained. Big

Brother turned the house show, too, into a competition. An even more triumphant microcosm

was Survivor—followed, in time, by The Amazing Race. The newer shows that defined the

microcosmic reality and blended it with competition adopted the same basic forms of social

discovery that had animated the birth of the English novel: the desert-island Robinsonade of

Survivor, the at-the-ends-of-the-earth-bedragons imperialist travelogue and quest romance of The

Amazing Race, even, perhaps, the sentimental seductions of The Bachelor, where so many

willing Clarissas rode in limousines squealing to a manor house to hand their hearts to Lovelace.

Yet Survivor never took up the society-from-nothing isolation of the desert island, which had

motivated the original Robinson Crusoe. The Amazing Race didn’t care about the Englishman-in-

Lilliput foreignness of Swift or the chance meetings of picaresque or even the travelers’ tall tales

in Hakluyt. The shows had no interest in starting civilization from scratch. Nor for that matter

were they much interested in travel—on The Amazing Race, you glimpse the blurred locals out

the windows of speeding cars. These shows were about the spectacularization of a microcosmic

America—about the reduction of society to a cross-section of our countrymen—still so very

American, never “going native.”

The shows put together sociable Americans, so they would have nothing left but their group

interactions, their social negotiations, to keep them going. Nobody let them starve, nothing

endangered them. Nominally structured as a contest of skill, skill mattered little and “alliances”

much on Survivor. The sniping and soothing in couples and trios—forming and reforming,

betraying and sticking together—were the main things of interest on that show and on The

Amazing Race, where it was hard to tell if we were supposed to care, really, that one pair ran

faster than another. How do Americans talk and how do they arrange things, in a completely

minimal setting, a little like the office and a little like the home but not totally unlike a

sequestered jury? So many of the contestants brought the workplace with them, and they were

meant to, since they were identified at every subtitle of their names with their stateside jobs:

Actor/Model, Computer Programmer, Fireman. This was our festival. Let’s see if the alliance

can hold between the Stock Trader, the Carpenter, and the Actress. Who will emerge as the

“Survivor”? Let’s race the Midget and her Cousin, so lovable, against the Bad Couple Who

Should Not Marry. Let’s see who our true representatives are.

The structure of each of the shows that “voted people off the island,” requiring the microcosm to

draw itself down each week, echoed, with static, the old idea of a republic of political equals,

who despite unequal skills and endowments one by one would recuse themselves from activity to

leave a single best representative behind to speak in public for their interests. If we truly all are

equals in America, this would be a picture, in ideal form, of how we choose aldermen and

selectmen and Congressmen—using our sovereignty to withdraw our sovereignty, that is to say,

to focus it in the hands, for two or four years, of individuals who act for us. By this means the

microcosm programs resembled political allegories.

And yet many of the reality shows of the microcosmic community were quite deliberately, self-

consciously implanted, sometimes by the rules, sometimes by the informal instructions given to

players, with an original sin. That sin was the will to power by trickery, the will to deception,

which puts the power-mad ahead of the natural leader. And the players did not rebel—they

accepted this, knowing it too well from home, from what they would call their “real life.”

“That’s how you play the game,” each aspiring survivor explained, with the resignation of a

trapped bear chewing off its leg, “you have to fool people, you can only be loyal to yourself.”

They had the republican ideal in their hands, and didn’t use it. It got confused with the economic

or Darwinian model of competition, in which anti-representative stratagems are justified because

one wins in the defeat and eradication of all others to gain a single jackpot. This, too, was an

aspect of the realness of “reality” for Americans: we knew we were witnessing republics of

voting or shared excellence competing, or perhaps blending, with another force in our lives.

As deception and power-hunger are the sins built into the microcosm, so the fixed norm is the

flaw introduced into shows of pure judgment. It produces the third ideal type of reality TV: the

show of the industry standard.

It was latent in the grand-scale dating shows, these contests that brought in the single judge and

red roses and arbitrary rules and an image of romantic love from somewhere in the minds of

Hallmark: but who knows, maybe this was close enough to the values of dreamy romance to

form some people’s preexisting reality. In American Idol, though, you see the strong beginning

of the reality show of the third type. American Idol was the best, and the most insinuating, of the

industry shows because it took one of the basic categories of common endeavor, that Rousseau

loved well—a singing contest, the commonplace sibling of a beauty or dancing or athletic

contest. Everyone sings, if only in the shower—and the footage of the worst contestants made

clear that the contest did include all of us, that the equivalent of singing in the shower was being

considered, too, on the way to the final idol. The show had “America” judge, by casting the final

votes, en masse. Yet it used professional judges in the meantime, a panel of allegorical experts,

Simon Cowell (rhymes with “scowl”; the Stern Judge; George III), Paula Abdul (the Universal

Sexy Mommy; Betsy Ross), and Randy Jackson (the Spirit of Diversity). Allegorically, America

would free itself from the tyranny of the English King, having learned his wisdom, pay due

homage to its own diversity, and enjoy the independence to make its own choice—which the

hands-tied Englishman’s production company would have to live with, and distribute to record

stores. Poor George III! What one really learned was that, unlike a singing contest in the high

school gym, the concern of the recording industry was not just, or no longer, whether someone

could sing. It was whether a contestant was fitted to the industry, malleable enough to meet the

norms of music marketing. The curtain was pulled away from the Great Oz, and the public

invited to examine his cockpit and vote which lever or switch to pull next. As it turns out, it is

really no less pleasant to choose a winner to suit the norms of music marketing, than to choose

on individual talent. One was still choosing, and the idol would still be ours. An idol of the

marketplace, to be sure, but still our representative American Idol.

The major new successes of the past few years have taught (or pretended to teach) the norms of

other industries. The Apprentice, a show in which one tries to learn skill in business, teaches the

arbitrariness of contemporary success in relation to skill. The winners are conditioned to meet a

certain kind of norm, not really familiar from anywhere else in life, which corresponds to “the

values of business” as interpreted by Trump. America’s Next Top Model shows how a beauty

contest ceases to be about beauty. The real fascination of the show is learning, first, how the

norms of the fashion industry don’t correspond to ordinary ideas of beauty (you knew it

abstractly, here’s proof!), but to requirements of the display of clothes and shilling for cosmetics;

second, how the show will, in the name of these norms, seek something quite different in its

contestants—a psychological adhesiveness, a willingness to be remade and obey. The Starlet

suggests the distance between the norms of TV acting and the craft of acting—and yet again, in

the name of “how it’s done in the industry,” which provides one kind of interest, the contestants

are recast psychologically, which provides the other. And on it goes, with “how to become a

chef” (Hell’s Kitchen) and “how to be a clothing designer’s minion” (The Cut), et cetera. 1

All this is interesting and revealing in its way. But the final stage is all too familiar: that is, the

flow back of norms justified by industry into norms for inner spaces—first the mind, which

accepts insane instructions and modifications, then the spaces that have nothing to do with either

public life or work, and should offer safety from their demands. I am thinking of the home and

the integral body, underneath the skin.

For a final, baroque range of reality shows has emerged in the last two years: The Swan, Extreme

Makeover, and, when these turned out to be slightly more than viewers could bear, Extreme

Makeover: Home Edition and its copycat shows. The Swan and Extreme Makeover also drew on

the most basic of all spectacles-of-excellence, the beauty contest or “pageant”—which once

formed a way of seeing or understanding the country, as in the Miss America contests (when you

would root for your state while admiring the flowers of the other forty-nine). And the new shows

advanced a new kind of norm by recreating it surgically, by literally rebuilding people’s faces

and bodies to suit, not beauty, but a kind of televisual glamour. Ordinary unattractive people,

given nose jobs, boob jobs, liposuction, lip collagen, tummy tucks, and chin pulls—plus fifty

minutes of therapy—looked like wax mannequins when, alone and imprisoned in a Gothic

mansion, the naturally lovely host pulled the velvet drapes back from the mirror, and the rebuilt

women, inevitably, began to weep, shocked. Then the host spoke: “You’re crying because

you’ve never seen yourself so beautiful. You’re crying because you’ve been transformed,”

intoning these words until the weeping speechless victim nodded. If this looked like

brainwashing, you hardly knew the horror of it until the camera cut to a boardroom of the

delighted surgical experts who had done the work—each one of them equally off-kilter and

monstrous because of surgical modifications made to his own face or teeth or eyes or hair.

(Flashback to one of the famous Rod Serling-written Twilight Zone episodes, this one from 1960:

an ordinary woman is called “ugly” and pressured into damaging facial surgery that we can’t

understand—until the camera pulls back to show us that everyone in her world is hideously

disfigured! Yee-ikes!)

The point of these shows was not just how people would be altered, but that they could be

altered. As the Six Million Dollar Man introduction used to say, “We have the technology . . .”

but what was needed was the rationale. When this transdermal insertion of the norm into average

people came to seem suspect, the networks increasingly devoted episodes to already hideously

ugly and disfigured people, so that the norm could be disguised as charity or medical necessity.

But the greater success proved to be the subtle turn, with charitable aspect intact, to demolishing

and rebuilding people’s homes rather than their faces, in the adjunct called Extreme Makeover:

Home Edition, which supersized existing home-decorating reality shows like Trading Spaces (on

which two neighbors agree to redecorate one room in each other’s home). Extreme Makeover

would get at privacy in one way or another; if not through the body then through the private

space that shelters it. A team of experts came in to wreck your shabby domicile and rebuild it.

The dwellings that resulted were no longer homes, but theme houses; instead of luxuries, the

designers filled rooms with stage sets keyed to their ten-minute assessments of the residents’

personalities: “Little Timmy wants to be a fireman, so we made his room look like it’s on fire!”

As long as the homeowners were poor or handicapped enough, anything was a step up. The show

has been an enormous hit.

Whatever can be done in the name of charity or medicine or health will allow the reinsertion of

the norm into further spheres of privacy. Fox is said to be planning Who Wants to Live Forever?,

a “program that predicts when participants will die and then helps them extend their lifespan

through dieting, exercise, [and] breaking bad habits.” The circle is closed, and “reality” here no

longer lets us observe our real life, but its modifications in the name of a statistical life to come.

The private matters we can’t, or shouldn’t, see flow in to replace our public witnessing of each

other. And the festival is no longer of ourselves, but of phantasms projected by industries of

health, beauty, home, all industries requiring our obedience; worse than the monsters of drama,

because they don’t admit their degree of fiction.

The reality of reality television is that it is the one place that, first, shows our fellow citizens to

us and, then, shows that they have been changed by television. This reality is the

unacknowledged truth that drama cannot, and will not, show you. A problem of dramatic

television, separate from what the corrupt characters say and do, is that it shows people who live

as if they were not being shaped by television. On this point it profoundly fails to capture our

reality. (The novel, in contrast, was always obsessed with the way consciousness was shaped and

ruined by reading novels.) And this is consistent with the way in which television, more than

other media, has a willingness to do the work of shaping life, and subservience to advertising and

industry, even when its creators do not understand what they’re up to. Drama says: this is

harmless, fictional. In fact it pushes certain ways of life. But wherever industrial norms

repenetrate the televised rendition of reality, they can directly push certain ways of life, no

longer even needing to use the mediation of “harmless” fiction and drama.

One can sometimes fight corruption with corruption: Blind Date to counter Friends. So what in

our television experience, against Extreme Makeover, will show the ways in which homes and

faces cannot be remade? Who will make the reality to counter “reality”?