A frightening instance of "reality television"

A little over a decade ago, I was sitting in my junior high homeroom – furiously trying to finish the algebra homework I had forgotten to do the night before.  As if my absolute ineptitude for mathematics wasn’t enough, I was very distracted by the cluster of kids in the corner talking about the mysterious letters they had received from a production company asking to use their homes as sets for a new HBO show called The Sopranos.

Like most suburban towns, the New Jersey suburb that I did most of my growing up in was (and arguably is) one of the most boring places to come of age.  None of us understood how a television show could be entertaining if we were to be their setting.  Later on we learned that The Sopranos was about Italian mobsters which was not a reality in our town at all.  Our mobsters were Russian… which of course reminded us all of the day our middle school’s backyard became a helicopter landing pad when authorities learned that the body of Russian Olympic boxer, Sergei Kobozev (missing for nearly a decade) was dug up when a couple tried to put a pool in their backyard.

When I really think about it, my boring little Jersey suburb did see quite a bit of excitement over the course of the thirteen years that I lived there.  However, whatever excitement existed is still diluted by a higher ratio of “reality” or days where nothing out of the ordinary occurred.  Successful narrative television such as The Sopranos know not to show you the days where Tony Soprano is just chilling with a copy of The Star-Ledger in his backyard and various other narrative dramas boil down the occurrences of thirteen years into a single season to keep things compelling.

Around the same time that The Sopranos had begun their narrative journey, I happened to be chilling in my backyard with a copy of The Star-Ledger and noticed that their TV listings had a new genre color code.  Now, among the likes of comedy, drama, news magazines, game shows and talk shows was what many of us had believed to be a passing trend: Reality TV.  Movies like The Truman Show and EdTV had speculated over the future of this genre and what it could mean for the industry and the “real” people that would partake in the programming but many of us thought this to be nothing more than commentary on what was a current fad.

Today, the kids who are the age I was upon reality TV’s inception know a world where the genre is not only official – but has its own subcategories.  Whether it is just a couple cameras simply following a group of faux-tanned partiers with obnoxious nicknames or a competitive reality show or a dating reality show or a competitive dating reality show, reality TV still thrives on the notion that its subjects are real and doing non-scripted things.  So if “normal,” narrative television goes through all that trouble of boiling down years of reality into a single season of dramatic goodness, why on earth is a genre excelling in showing us the stuff that we supposedly don’t need to see?

Let’s not discuss human nature’s gravitation towards voyeurism or just how real “reality” is – there are plenty of other articles about that and quite frankly, this subject is pretty dated.  While I recognize I tend to be late to the game when it comes to trending topics (I just discovered Lady Gaga last week), this isn’t why I’ve waited as long as I have to comment on reality TV.  Reality shows have truly evolved in recent times and it goes beyond finding a bunch of crazy personalities and making them live together.  In fact, you’ll find the most successful of the genre follow the rules of Storytelling 101 pretty strictly.

Every Tuesday night, NBC makes me an emotional mess.  Why, do you ask? Because The Biggest Loser has mastered storytelling.  Yep.  I said it.  The producers of what is essentially just a weight loss show are self-aware and respect their audiences enough to know that we know that it’s television. So rather than pretending the cameras and lights aren’t blatantly lining the fourth wall, they incorporate every element of television production into the program’s storyline – including themselves.  What’s very interesting about the way they go about this is the fact the producers are often painted as the antagonists.  They are constantly cited as the ones behind the challenge or temptation that is used to keep our protagonists from reaching their goal.  The protagonists are the morbidly obese contestants of the show, each with a heart-wrenching backstory that explains the dire situations they’ve put themselves in.  These protagonists are taken out of their comfort zones of home and displaced in a setting that serves as a catalyst for them to learn and achieve their wants.  Following the throughline of these various characters throughout the season, watching their struggles with missing their families and living with strangers and battling the unseen producers’ combative desires for “good tv” – then ultimately seeing them achieve their very physical, tangible goals is everything a good story can ask for.  Couple this with the epic music they use with every weigh-in and you’ve got yourself some great television.

When once I thought a narrative show shot in my boring town would equate to a boring show, the evolution of reality TV programming has demonstrated that anyone’s reality can be made interesting as long as you handle it with a page out of the storytelling textbook.  Producers today are handing out reality television show contracts like candy so while there are a whole lot of misses out there, it’s refreshing to see some meet success… unless it means the drama continues after the cameras go away… but that’s a whole other article.