The Reality of My Surroundings

Let’s talk about reality TV. Dirty word, old hat, I know. It became popular with production studios because it’s relatively cheap to film and the turnaround can be quick. It became a staple when producers realized they could hire people to actually write out scripts but no longer had to pay them as writers according to union rules. Blah blah blah, big picture stuff.

Is reality TV my guilty pleasure? No. Absolutely not. I’m still as picky and critical about this genre as any other, although to be fair I must admit that reality TV is almost too broad to count as a genre. It’s almost a production style. Think about it: the shows are all still storyboarded, scripted, and written. They’re professionally shot. They’re edited. Even within reality TV one finds the actual genres. While most “scripted” television falls into comedy, drama, procedural, and so on reality TV has its own subsets. There’s voyeur, competition, hidden camera. Even then, there are the more traditional genres that work in parallel: comedy, drama, romance. The “reality” in reality TV is more of a production pretension than anything else. It’s just as conscious of itself as hand camera work on “gritty” police shows. But enough about the general. Let’s get specific. What do I watch?

I don’t think I watch a single voyeur show. That “follow some schmucks around with cameras” style. That’s not my thing. To me it’s a bunch of people who can’t act, acting poorly, pretending that they’re explicitly not acting. It’s a perfect storm of poorly executed drek. There are a couple of hidden camera (Tosh.0) and meta-hidden camera (The Soup!) shows I that I watch, none on a regular basis. They act as surrogate Youtube which is fitting as that’s what a large portion of content comes from. So what’s the meat of my reality tv? Competition shows. And yet still, I’m very particular…

RuPaul’s Drag Race
This is not a guilty pleasure. It’s just… pleasure. It’s allegedly a competition but it’s really more of a Mean Girls-esque season long fight. It’s so campy that rich people could send their kids there during the summer. The girls’ tastes are almost always questionable but then there’s the fact that they make about two or three outfits an episode and there’s almost zero screen time devoted to them actually constructing their clothes. There’s tons of footage of them criticizing the other contestants, planning, and walking around. But there’s oddly little time devoted to what could be an entire show. That just goes to show that Drag Race knows exactly what that is, and what it is is fabulous.

America’s Next Top Model
Fine, this one comes as close to a guilty pleasure as I can find. I don’t watch this on a regular schedule. I will gladly binge during a marathon. I don’t really watch it for the competition. Like a bizzare David Lynch piece, Top Model’s competition is only a meta-narrative wrapped around the real core of this show: the slow, disturbingly candid unraveling of a model. It’s all about Tyra and her descent into a Hollywood madness. It’s possibly a modern day reboot of Sunset Boulevard. What happens to someone when, rather than fading into obscurity off camera, they loose themselves to their ego and id while the camera’s still roll. On top of her explicitly narcissistic behavior you also have the additional point that these cameras are hers. She’s producing it. And while she’s being paid for episodes it’s a self-produced vanity project. The cameras that are so interested in capturing her? They’re her cameras! This is truly a dark piece of art.

Additionally it has the dubious distinction of being one of the few reality shows that has lowered my opinion of the subjects rather than confirm or elevate it. I used to think that the whole “vapid, stupid model” archetype was a bit shallow. Now I see that it’s utterly accurate.

Project Runway
Let’s take a trip up the ladder of quality. This one is not nearly as circuitous in its quality. This show is about fashion design. It’s a blast. Really, it’s hard to do much more. You have a bunch of artistic extroverts living and working on top of each other for a hellish month. The challenges range from blatant advertising to bizarre materials and the results are usually equally all over the place. What’s great is that seeing the context of some the more out there designs actually provides a real grounding to them. While not strictly accessible, this show sometimes makes the avant garde palatable. Another thing that I like is that I get to see the process behind an art that I am very unfamiliar with in my personal life. That’s not to say I don’t have style. I can be a singularly dapper dan. It’s the sketching to fabrication that blows me away. The process is fantastic and I adore being exposed to it.

I should add for the sake of disclosure that Tim Gunn is my patronus.

So You Think You Can Dance
There’s no hidden agenda when watching this show. It takes the competition set of reality shows and turns it on its head… by being about the content rather than the contest. I had the exact opposite reaction this than I did with Top Model. I went in not really caring all that much about dance and left the first season that I watched (probably season 3 or so) in love with dance. I don’t dance. I won’t dance. I probably can’t dance but won’t bother to find out. But I can say that this show has made me love dance. I can watch along to certain competitions and, understanding the rules and methods, have come to enjoy the criticism. I love analysis and sometimes that active deconstruction is all I get out of certain activities. SYTYCD is as far from that as a show can get.

The contest is about dance and, being dance, they have to have partners. That means trusting each other on the show as well as elevating them. Because of that there’s never any of that “drama” (real or fabricated) to be seen. It’s almost more like an locked room mystery, with a large cast all working together while slowly dwindling toward the final guest. The judges are even welcoming, asking people to try out again when they have more experience. And they mean it too. I’ve seen them take returning auditioners and push them ahead to the second round because they had proven themself before.

And oh, the judges. Rather than just a barely wrangled set of three random semi-celebrities, each with their own inherent demographic appeal, this show gives us experts. That means when they criticize they sometimes speak over the heads of the audience (myself included) with the use of technical terms. Why? Because they actually have something constructive to say to the dancers. So often criticism from TV judges are the sort of things that give criticism a bad name. Here they give out professional notes.

And I do believe that takes us to the end of the reality tour. I like to think that the common thread that these all have is none of them makes me sit on the couch, smug, and feel superior to the featured people. Maybe the models on Top Model but I still contest that the show is actually a grand tragedy about Tyra, perhaps even a dark character study. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to films some Dogme 95 in the pursuit of real truth.