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Reality Television: Oxymoron

George Will

WASHINGTON--Fred Allen, a mordantly sophisticated radio performer, died (mercifully, if not

causally) just as television was permeating America, in 1956. He warned us: ``Imitation is the

sincerest form of television.'' So there will be imitations of ``Fear Factor.'' That NBC program, in

its first episode last week, attracted nearly 12 million voyeurs to watch simpletons confront their

fears, for a fee. In that episode, confronters were covered by a swarm of biting rats. This week

the program featured a willingness to eat worms and sit in a tub of them. ``Fear Factor'' is an

imitation of an MTV program, ``Jackass,'' named, perhaps, for its target viewer. But American

television is being imitative. ABC's ``Nightline'' reports that French, Spanish and Japanese

television have similar programming, although none has--yet--matched the Peruvian show that

pays poor people to eat maggots and be splattered with frog excrement. Last spring NBC

concocted XFL football, promising more violence on the field and more cheerleaders' breasts on

the sidelines than the NFL provides. The league drew a big audience for the first telecast, but the

ratings began to plunge by the third quarter, and the league died after one season. Optimists

concluded that NBC had underestimated the viewing public. The optimists were, as usual,

wrong. NBC understood that it had underestimated only the perversity required to rivet the

attention of millions in an era when graphic violence and sexual puerilities are quotidian

television. So NBC sank to the challenge of thinking lower. But it had better not rest on its

laurels because its competitors in the race to the bottom will not rest, and the bottom is not yet in

sight. The possible permutations of perversity programming--the proper name for what is called,

oxymoronically, ``reality television''--are as limitless as, apparently, is the supply of despicably

greedy or spectacularly stupid people willing to degrade themselves for money. (A philosophical

puzzle: Can such people be degraded? But perhaps the monetary incentive is superfluous, given

today's endemic exhibitionism that makes many people feel unrecognized, unauthenticated--or

something--unless they are presented, graphically, to an audience. Ours is an age besotted with

graphic entertainments. And in an increasingly infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is

reducible to a celebration of ``choice,'' adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in

their absorption in entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in--video

games, computer games, hand-held games, movies on their computers and so on. This is

progress: more sophisticated delivery of stupidity. An optimistic premise of our society, in which

``choice'' is the ideal that trumps all others, is that competition improves things, burning away the

dross and leaving the gold. This often works with commodities like cars but not with mass

culture. There competition corrupts. America, determined to amuse itself into inanition, is

becoming increasingly desensitized. So entertainment seeking a mass audience is ratcheting up

the violence, sexuality and degradation, becoming increasingly coarse and trying to be--its

largest challenge--shocking in an unshockable society. The primitive cosmopolitans among us

invariably say: Relax. Chaucer's Wife of Bath, the Impressionists and James Joyce's ``Ulysses''

have been considered scandalous. As the Supreme Court has said, ``One man's vulgarity is

another man's lyric.'' All right, then: One man's bearbaiting is another's opera. That British

pastime involved pitting a chained bear against a pack of dogs, who fought, and usually killed,

the bear. The historian Macaulay famously said that the Puritans opposed bearbaiting not

because it gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. The Puritans were

right: Some pleasures are contemptible because they are coarsening. They are not merely private

vices, they have public consequences in driving the culture's downward spiral. A mass audience

is its own justification to purveyors of perversity television, who say: We are only supplying a

market. As though there was a strong spontaneous demand for televised degradation. The

argument that the existence of customers justifies the product distinguishes the purveyors of

``Fear Factor'' not at all from heroin pushers, who are not the purveyors' moral inferiors. How

will a ``pro-choice'' society object to a program--let's call it ``Who Really Wants to be a

Millionaire?''--on which consenting contestants will be offered $1 million to play Russian

roulette with a revolver loaded with a real bullet? Imagine the audience for the chance to see

violent death in living color in prime time in the comfort of one's living room. That's

entertainment.