Reality TV

I suffered a moral and psychological death over the summer when I spent a day indoors with my beloved watching nothing but MTV, during which time, something peculiar happened. My tear ducts crusted over, my mouth hung half-open at all times, I couldn't see anything more than ten feet away, and my brain was incapable of any deductive thought whatsoever. It was the cursive effects of Reality TV, dear reader. I've grown out of it, and endured far too much of it. My much admired journaling icon, James Wolcott, who I avidly read every day even when I haven't the slightest idea what he's talking about, laments the smoldering wreckage of popular culture and, with it, the United States. He punctuates his piece with subheadings enumerating the various after-effects of Reality TV. Under the heading, 'Reality TV wages class warfare and promotes proletariat exploitation', he brings to light something that, in retrospect, seems obvious:

The migrant camera fodder is often kept isolated, sleep-deprived, and alcoholically louche to render the subjects edgy and pliant and susceptible to fits. “If you combine no sleep with alcohol and no food, emotions are going to run high and people are going to be acting crazy,” a former contestant on ABC’s The Bachelor said.

This trend is rather off-putting, I hope you'll agree; to ween the participants on a Reality TV show into aggression and instability represents a very low form of broadcasting. What's more, does it not defeat the point of Reality TV if you're goading the contestants in this way? Of course, this sort of thing is done in a nuanced, delicate way that isn't superficially intuitive by shows like Big Brother, but to learn that it goes on behind the scenes is pretty alarming ("behind the scenes" [?]). Of course, we should have no sympathy for individuals who submit themselves to such ritual humiliation in the hope of televisual stardom, but they've become, as Wolcott says, "fodder" for the broadcasting giants, A&E, Bravo, MTV, VH1, etc.. Let us leave it in the dirt, smoldering away in the desert heat, while we free ourselves with a bit more House.