Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [14]
Then again, I realized, this is what attracted me to Billie Jeanne, and her show, in the first place. For all of Married by America’s ridiculous trappings—the audience voting, the hot-tub parties, the cheesy adherence to the concept of true love forever—it felt real somehow. People meet their eternal life partners on the subway, or at bars, or at church. I met my wife through the newspaper personals. Is that really any more ridiculous than marrying someone you meet on a game show? Billie Jeanne wanted to get Married by America. When that didn’t work out, she sought to get married by more conventional methods, and then she did.
Her untragic fate illumines what most of us face in life. It’s ordinary, boring, and banal. A few people are destined to follow an exceptional path, or to have things collapse for them absolutely, but most of us don’t experience such highs and lows. A trip to your high school or college reunion puts the lie to the myth that we were all born to be special. Simply, we’re not. We marry, have kids, get old, shit the bed, and die. Our reality TV stars may get the brief illusion of transcendence. They take a few Hollywood meetings and occasionally get cast in a Road Rules reunion. In the end, though, they’re just like the rest of us, and anyone who was on Married by America is more like the rest of us than most.
4
THE CUTTING CREW
Jancee Dunn
IT HAPPENED THE WAY THESE THINGS OFTEN DO. I was drifting around my Brooklyn apartment on a Sunday afternoon, putting off a writing assignment. I had already given the place a procrastination cleaning so compulsively thorough that at one point I found myself consolidating two boxes of bandages into one more streamlined package. And so I turned on the television—a no-no among my writer cronies, who argue that daytime TV begins a dissolute spiral downward. Writers are a vulnerable population of clammy, sweatpants-clad hermits, and while other groups are quite capable of “just turning on The View for ten minutes,” we are not. For me, a quick check-in with Barbara and the gang would lead to a twenty-two-hour sloth-a-thon capped by a five a.m. showing of Turner & Hooch. Then I’d start drinking. Then I’d start doing drugs.
So it was with extreme trepidation that I reached for the remote, but I was desperate not to work. I flicked uninterestedly through dozens of channels before landing on Bravo, which was running a marathon of the 2004 first season of Project Runway. I sighed. I was never a fan of reality TV, never able to join in the watercooler chat about the latest episode of American Idol. My grannyish viewing preferences tilted toward cozy mystery series on PBS starring elderly but plucky detectives.
Five minutes into Project Runway, I put the remote down. An hour later, I had taken a pillow from my bed and tucked it under my back for a more comfortable viewing position on the couch. Three hours later, I was absently shoving a box of pizza rolls into my toaster oven with my eyes fastened to the screen as I rooted for contestant Jay McCarroll to win. Around midnight, I got my wish.
The premise of the show is simple: a cutthroat group of contestants competes to create a garment, usually with alarmingly limited time and materials, to be presented at a runway show at the end of the program. Every episode presents a different design challenge, ranging from nutty (an outfit made with items from the grocery store) to inspired (fashioning a new ensemble from the clothes on contestants’ backs). Up until the sixth season, taping took place in New York City—to bang the point home there are many, many loving shots of massing pigeons and yellow taxicabs—with much of the action taking place