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By Root 249 0

you need is a crew, the subjects, and a team of editors to manipulate the footage), and there is an endless supply of people willing to be in them. They can be targeted to highly specific demographics (single female seniors living in rest homes in the Midwest) so that highly specific products can be placed in them or advertised on them while they’re broadcast (adult diapers and romance novels). They cross cultures, cross racial and ethnic lines, cross religious barriers. They appeal to members of every socio economic class and social strata. They are watched by viewers of every age and every generation. And they’re a dream for network programmers. They eat up hours, attract viewers and advertisers, and there’s little at stake if one of them fails. For someone like me, we are living in a golden age.

My first memories of watching a reality show are the hours I spent with The Real World: New York. First broadcast on MTV, in 1992, it was, at the time, a revolutionary idea: stick some people in their early twenties in a big place to live and follow them around while they go about their lives. It was also a remarkably simple idea, the kind of idea that made you angry that you didn’t think of it yourself. Initially, when I first saw the ads and promos for it, I wondered why I would want to watch it. I had enough bullshit in my life—girl problems, too many drugs and too much drinking, no job and no desire to have a job. Why would I care about some one else’s? Once it started, though, people began talking about it—about the drama of it, about their favorite cast members, about what they thought would happen next. It sounded remarkably like a normal TV show, except that the people were real, and lived in the real world. I got high one afternoon and tuned in. I don’t remember where in the season they were, or what happened on the episode, and it doesn’t matter. I saw people doing shit that I could identify with, except that it seemed cooler, more exciting, more dramatic, more difficult, more rewarding, more perilous, more of everything, and, most important, more real. I was fucking hooked.

I watched that season, and the next, in Los Angeles, and the next, in San Francisco, and I’ve watched every season since. For a long time I didn’t know why I liked it or what made it more real to me or why I continued watching, along with millions of other people. And then the real world descended on me—the real real world—and I had to make money and support myself and figure out what the fuck I was going to do, and I started writing. At first I wrote bullshit in journals about my daily comings and goings, then I wrote films, then I started writing books, or trying to write books, based on my own life. As it did on The Real World, and on every other reality show, shit happened, some of it good and some it bad, some of it exciting and some of it boring. I had highs and lows; I had heartbreaks and triumphs; I loved and I lost. When I started writing about it, I realized it wasn’t enough to just document it or to portray it in some objective way; it needed to be manipulated, altered, heightened and diminished, it needed to be edited for effect, and for pace, and for structure. That to tell a story, and tell it well, one needed a beginning, a middle, and an end. That to tell to a story, and tell it well, life, reality, day-to-day events, could be a basis, but that additions would need to be made to make the story live and breathe and function, to make it seem like life, to make it seem real. I learned the great secret of reality television, and of writing, and of every other form of narrative self-documentation and narrative storytelling: that it’s all fake, every second of it, every minute of it, every page of it, every episode of it. It’s all fucking fake. Manipulated and embellished and edited. Fake so that it can be real. Structured and polished. Fake so that we can consume it and connect to it and identify with it and enjoy it. Made to entertain. We call it the real world, but it’s not. It’s all fucking fake.

And to me, at least, it doesn’t matter.