Am I reality TV snob? Define snob.
I like your writing, but I’ve noticed that you don’t review reality TV. That is disappointing to me! I love reading about everything from the “Real Housewives” to “Survivor.” Are you a snob?
NO SHAME
A. I don’t generally review reality TV, it is true. I did write about it back in the early aughts, when the genre was really starting to take off. I found it fascinating, in that some of the shows did feel like little social experiments, even with all the cameras around. I did get the sense that I was watching human nature in play, to some extent. But the genre quickly lost any innocence it might have once had. The contestants had seen enough reality TV to learn how to play to the cameras, and the makers of reality TV quickly understood that the big mouths and belligerents were the ticket to word of mouth and big ratings.
Once it was clear that the producers were manipulating the action and the truth was not in the offing, I soured on it all. I lost interest in writing about it. The seasons weren’t laboratories of human behavior where people are put to extremes; they’d become both puppet shows, with producers and agents pulling the strings, and self-promotional ventures for attention hounds. The artificiality and staginess of the vanity shows, like the Kardashian products, and the dating shows also left me cold.
I also felt discomfort over the way many viewers — not the ones watching in irony, but the majority — were taking it all at face value. The shows were blurring the line between nonfiction and fiction and viewers were accepting that passively. Yes, I do think that blurriness is in some way connected to the phenomena of misinformation and disinformation that have been dogging America for a number of years now — but that’s a subject for another time.
Am I a snob? I don’t think so. I don’t judge people negatively because they love to watch reality TV. You’d have to do a lot worse to make me haughty. But professionally, I prefer to spend time focusing on the scripted series that have been having a renaissance over the past 20 years — mostly on cable and streaming, now that the networks have given over their primetime schedules to reality shows, procedural franchises, and game shows. The scripted stuff tends to trigger my imagination, and capture human nature, and provide artistic appreciation more than the cheaply made alternatives. Bottom line, there’s more to say about them.