A Reckoning with Reality (TV)
Lucas Mann’s love letter to his wife—and to the jacked-up emotions of reality TV.
When we were first getting into The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the husband of one of the show’s stars, who had seemed to be a real asshole (like potentially abusive) on-screen, hanged himself. The following season, his widow was back, shocked yet resilient, weepy but still game.
At the height of The Real Housewives of New Jersey (your favorite), Teresa went to jail for the mail, wire, and bank fraud that had funded the lifestyle she so proudly flaunted for the cameras. Her special return-home episode airs next month.
In the middle of our Here Comes Honey Boo Boo obsession, Honey Boo Boo’s mother’s boyfriend got arrested for rape, child molestation, aggravated child molestation, and aggravated sexual assault battery against Honey Boo Boo’s sister. The show got canceled, but Honey Boo Boo did appear in a special obesity episode of The Doctors, and now her mother is on Marriage Boot Camp.
After we watched the first three seasons of 19 Kids and Counting, the scandal broke about the oldest of the nineteen molesting his sisters and avoiding prosecution by being sent to some backward-ass Christian labor camp. Jim Bob, the patriarch, vowed they’d be back soon, putting complete confidence in God’s plan.
I’m not really sure what to do with all this; I’m just getting a list going. The obvious question to bring up here is: Are we complicit? “We” meaning you and me but also, in that awful think-piecey way, standing in for the culture.
Sure. I suppose we are complicit. The attention given to sociopaths, and the public pain that results from the potent mixture of attention and sociopathy, exists only because there are reliable consumers who enjoy the cocktail. And then we wait for more of the same, so more of the same is provided.
The argument goes that the more reality television there is, the more saturated we become with hysterical realnessthe less enamored we can be by the small, sincere moments that make up a common life, and so the people who make it onto reality shows are only those psychotic enough to cause a scene. Producers, and by extension viewers, are fueling the psychosis by highlighting it, elevating it, while simultaneously opening every action to scrutiny, trapping the lunatics in a cycle of self-exploitation until the crack is exposed. Or maybe the shows forced a crack in people that wasn’t there before. Either way, the end result is
