Television, especially reality TV, is often criticized for being bland and vapid trash that will melt your brain. Now this may be true, but I think there’s more to it than that.
Have you seen “Breaking Bad,” “The Walking Dead” or “Parks and Recreation”? Apparently they’re pretty great, as everyone tells me every day. “Did you watch “Walking Dead”? “Lol epicness, so good,” is regularly featured on my Facebook wall.
The truth is the “good” shows are still doing what reality shows do, just in a less trashy way. At least that’s what I tell myself to explain why people watch “Pawn Stars,” “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and “16 and Pregnant.”
You can deny having ever watched these kinds of shows, but you’d only be lying to yourself. I don’t even have a working TV in my dorm, but thanks to the magic of the Internet, I’ve seen every episode of “Hoarders” and “Hoarding: Buried Alive.”
There’s some kind of sick fascination in these shows that human beings seem drawn to. We can all gather around and project our collective shame onto a show about people living in houses insulated by garbage.
After all, couldn’t any one of us end up like the people on these shows? Weren’t the folks on
“Toddlers & Tiaras” born into this world as the same blank slates that you were?
Sometimes I wonder if I will become like one of the mole people on “Hoarders,” doomed to save receipts and paper bags in my bedroom for all time. This motivates me to clean my room.
Even the good shows have a certain inane quality. The protagonist will overcome a certain situation, only to stumble into another one, always on the brink of destruction. That is every drama show on TV. Why can’t a show just end on a sweet, dignified note?
But the reason those intense dramas are so popular is because life often feels like a drama. Many people really do feel like they are constantly being thrown from one desperate situation to another.
Making money is a constant pursuit in our lives, but we are also lazy, hence the popularity of shows about reselling old, stained basketball cards for millions of dollars.
Humans have stupid quirks and bizarre fixations. Reality TV just reflects that back at us. Yes, it isn’t true “reality,” but that doesn’t mean it can’t say something about what we as a society are thinking. Maybe with that in mind, the egg-headed and the doo-doo brained can both learn something from TV other than…well, nothing.
