Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [44]
Four weeks later, you request a meeting with the line producer and quit. “That’s funny,” he says, “because I was just about to let you go.” You head out for a celebratory beer alone, at a gay bar in Silverlake. You have just enough money for a couple of months here, and by then, with luck, you’ll find out who you are. It’s haircut night at this place, and there’s this line of men getting their heads shaved. Somewhere in the middle of the line is this fellow who looks like Poseidon. You brave up, introduce yourself, and get his e-mail address. You decide no more games. You are going to be as direct as you can be and ask for what you want. Happiness and winning—two totally separate feelings, really.
You write him an e-mail. By this point, you know how it goes.
Except the next day, when you least expect it, he answers.
Game over.
12
THE AFTER-PARTY
John Albert
THERE ARE TIMES WHEN ONE CAN GLIMPSE something like a passageway to hell. That is precisely the feeling I had watching the reality show Sober House. It was as if a wormhole had opened leading directly from my couch into a tawdry Hollywood where troubled celebrities will humiliate and debase themselves, even risk death, for one more moment in the spotlight. Throughout the years, I have witnessed on-screen murder scenes and televised surgeries, even watched multiple seasons of The Real Housewives of Orange County. But this show genuinely disturbed me. These were not bullet-riddled bodies or sunburned Republicans with fake boobs. They were people I recognized, both literally and figuratively, and it left me troubled.
The truth is, I have been addicted to reality television for years. Until recently, I simply hid this fact. People would discuss what they had done the previous evening, reading books or watching foreign films, and I would simply lie. I would tell them I had spent hours viewing savage Internet pornography or simply curled up in the fetal position weeping. Anything was more palatable than the truth: that I had sat for hours on my couch and watched reality television. And I’m not talking about the few socially acceptable shows like Project Runway or Top Chef. Like most addicts, I had long since turned to the hard stuff. In the early years, I was able to convince myself that watching seminal shows like Cops and The Real World was merely a form of social observation not unlike viewing documentaries such as Nanook of the North or The Sorrow and the Pity. That became distinctly less believable as I watched hefty actors being weighed on a giant egg scale during Celebrity Fit Club.
So what draws me to shows in which fading celebrities are humiliated for the sake of entertainment? Is it the vindictive pleasure of watching previously anointed ones tumbled unceremoniously from their thrones? That’s definitely possible, and I’m not at all immune. There was a night in my late teens when I went to deliver a small parcel of cocaine for a local drug dealer. I arrived at the designated address and was surprised to find the homecoming king and queen of my high school huddled in an empty apartment, paranoid and nearly broke. Oh, how the mighty had fallen, I remember thinking, as I left with their last few dollars. I think for some people there is a similar jolt of superiority in watching a show like The Surreal Life, in which someone like Mötley Crue singer Vince Neil is reduced to performing in a childlike talent show with Emmanuel Lewis from Webster. I’m also aware that it could simply be my own sadistic tendencies. Fair enough.
But then, while watching Sober House, I suddenly hit bottom. Something felt noticeably different. The show, which is a spin-off of the series Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, follows seven down-and-out celebrities as they attempt to stay off drugs while living at a sober living home run by radio personality and addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky. The group consists of a porn actress, an American Idol runner-up, a rap rocker,