Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [3]
Despite an infatuation I’d long had with one reality show (see Chapter 10), I didn’t become tethered to my television during the onslaught of reality TV in the 2000s, when Survivor, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, and Trading Spaces, among others, all kicked off. At that point I was truly susceptible to only a certain flavor of reality—specifically the kind that focused on attractive, thin, wealthy people who seemed to have something I wanted (in some cases, merely the temporary house they were in) but who nonetheless managed to seem more screwed-up than me. Or just thin, pretty people competing with one another and thus displaying whatever viciousness or charm would carry them to victory.
Somehow, it was a quick descent from interest to obsession. By the time I was semi-hysterically texting friends when I saw Santino from Project Runway at a party, I’d swallowed the Kool-Aid, powder and all.
And then, rather suddenly, I found myself making money as an “expert” on reality television. When I wasn’t writing a reality TV column for the Fox News Web site, I was chatting about who had betrayed whom and with who for a show called Reality Remix on Fox’s Reality Network. And I learned, through repeated exposure to everything from The Apprentice to E!’s Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive (an underappreciated ode to spoiled Hollywood kids that featured a pre–Keeping Up with the Kardashians Kourtney) that I was fully capable of getting excited about any reality program. The same elements of the pretty people shows that hooked me—the overdramatization, the delusional behavior—were in play on every episode of every show. Greedy, inspiring, stupid, scheming, hilarious, self-aggrandizing—whatever the situation called for, each participant, thanks to some slick editing, filled out his or her stereotype perfectly.
Through some extremely unscientific research, I determined that other writers were equally obsessed with this form of entertainment. Most of us are home all day, aching from within the depths of our souls for new forms of procrastination. We’re observers of life and usually focused on creating interesting characters or filling our scenes with dramatic tension—both essentials for gripping reality TV. We also probably have some narcissism running through us (as Tennesee Williams once said, egomania is almost the precondition of all creative work). And many of us fight to become a part of the cultural conversation in a way that your average Rock of Love seems easily able to, so there’s always the possibility that our interest is laced with a dash of masochistic envy.
Turns out, I was right—about the passion for the topic, if not about the reasons behind it. Of the initial list of writers I contacted, only one said he didn’t like reality TV; in the next sentence, he confessed that he didn’t actually own a television. Instead of worrying about making sure that every single genre or channel was represented, I asked each writer to pick the show they were most obsessed with. And the results were even more revelatory than I’d imagined: from Jerry Stahl speculating that the prisoners on Lockup had actually made it—after all, they were being televised—to Jancee Dunn envying the designers on Project Runway for the fact that they could be creative in groups while writers have to work alone (or in the company of cats), to Toby Young giving a hilarious play-by-play account of appearing on a BBC show, to Rex Sorgatz analyzing how much reality television is merely reflective of the falseness that makes up everyday life, to John Albert confronting the “villain” of Sober House, to Stacey Grenrock Woods examining what it’s like to live in semi-poverty in the wake of The Real Housewives, to Neal Pollack tracing his own former fascination with unstable women through the prism of the wayward lass on Married by America, to Richard Rushfield coming clean about how covering American Idol for the Los Angeles Times turned him into a fanatic with the tattoo to prove it, each essay reveals as much about the writer as the show—and about why