THE PRICE ISN'T RIGHT
CBS’s The Briefcase raises the stakes on reality TV’s habit of turning hardship into entertainment
Inequality is rising in many Western countries, jobs are becoming ever more precarious, and even formerly comfortable middle-class families are wrestling with mountains of debt and uncertain futures: perfect fodder for reality television.
That seems to be the thinking behind a spate of recent programs in the U.S., Australia and the U.K. that have packaged economic misery into entertainment for the masses. The most manipulative of the bunch is the new CBS series The Briefcase, which debuted to strong ratings despite being criticized as exploitative.
The premise of The Briefcase is that a family that had agreed to take part in a documentary about money is unexpectedly drafted into a game show when producers show up with a briefcase holding $100,000 in cash. The dumbstruck couple is then told it’s theirs to keep, but that they can also choose to split it or give it all away to another needy family in similar or worse circumstances, kicking off days of gut-wrenching deliberations as the couple weigh their own suffering against that of others. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, the other family is presented with the exact same scenario.
What The Briefcase does is set in motion a kind of financial prisoner’s dilemma, with unwitting marks made subjects of a cruel experiment in game theory — all based on a lie.
The show has little to say about the economic conditions that have put working-class and middle-class families on such shaky footing, and societal concerns such as joblessness, health insurance and mounting levels of debt are viewed only through the lens of personal tragedy, the better to raise the emotional stakes. In fact, one woman featured in the premiere episode was so conflicted over what to do with her briefcase she actually vomited from the stress. Now that’s good television!
But if The Briefcase is guilty of sentimentalizing its subjects’ struggles, other shows in this genre do their best to wallow in the misery.
The Channel 4 series Benefits Street, following residents in an impoverished corner of England where the majority are on social welfare, led to an uproar in the U.K. when it first aired, with some on the program even receiving death threats for being “benefits spongers” and burdens to society.
A similar documentary series that just aired in Australia, Struggle Street, depicts life in the Sydney suburb of Mount Druitt as one of endless violence, drug abuse and destitution. Many of the residents featured later com- plained that they had been led to believe Struggle Street would paint a full picture of the community, not turn it into a punchline. One of the main people in the series, Peta Kennedy, complained that hours of footage of her community work never made it into the program, even as her husband’s loud on-air fart became a humiliating centrepiece of promos for the series.
Perhaps the most egregious entry in this depressing genre, though, comes courtesy of the BBC, which has been accused of holding a Hunger Gamesstyle competition that pits poor people against one another. Some 30,000 people have already signed a petition asking the U.K. public broadcaster to pull the plug on Britain’s Hardest Grafter.
According to a casting notice, 25 unemployed and low-wage workers will compete against each other in a variety of jobs over five weeks, with the “least effective” worker sent home at the end of each round. The last remaining grafter will walk away with a £15,000 prize, or about one year’s living wages (outside London, naturally).
As Esther Breger notes in The New Republic, there’s a long history of exploitative broadcasting that serves to make the audience feel better about itself in relation to those on the screen, going at least as far back as Queen for a Day, first a radio program and later a hit TV show in the 1950s. It featured several working women who essentially begged for help from the audience, which then voted by applause on which woman’s story was most miserable and therefore deserving of a new appliance or medical equipment.
But the current crop of poverty porn isn’t taking place in a world of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as John Steinbeck memorably described the mindset among America’s poor. Social mobility is not what it used to be, and we know it. A 2014 Pew poll found a majority of those surveyed in rich Western countries believe the next generation will be worse off financially than those that came before, even as the economic divide between the rich and poor within many industrialized nations widens.
The recent programs that exploit this divide treat common struggles to pay the bills and raise a family with limited means into a kind of exotic otherness to be gawked at — or, at best, solved through a fortuitous briefcase rather than confronted in a more meaningful way. Does it make for compelling television? Certainly, but as the narrator on The Briefcase presciently warns: “What you are about to see will make you question what matters most.”
‘One woman actually vomited from the stress’