Reality TV: Why Do So Many People Watch It?

In "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: Why the Lyric Essay is Better Than Fiction", David Shields points out that most "art" tries to get as close to reality as possible. This may not be true in every single case, but he makes a good point.

My first instinct after reading Shields as well as this article was to write about whether reality TV is art or not. However, I think this question is fundamentally unanswerable; art is a broad term that is difficult to define (although Wikipedia tries really hard). And in many ways, whether or not reality TV has artistic value or not is irrelevant because people watch it anyway. So I decided that I would talk about why I think this is.

I don't watch a lot of reality TV; it's just not something I've ever had much interest in watching. I hope that doesn't come across as me sounding pretentious, because that's not how I mean it. I've just never gotten into reality TV.

Last fall, my roommates got caught up in a TLC show called "Breaking Amish." They started watching it as a joke: someone saw a commercial for it and thought it looked funny, they were bored one Sunday night and started watching it "as a joke." But at some point between the first and last episode of the season, it stopped being a joke and just became a show they watched.

My sister is really into reality shows. I've seen her annihilate seasons of Dance Moms (fun fact, a friend of ours was actually on the show) and if it has to do with cake or dresses, chances are she's seen it. I would say she watches reality TV about as much as she watches Dawson's Creek or One Tree Hill or Gilmore Girls.

My point with these examples is that although I don't personally watch reality TV, I understand their appeal to viewers completely. It gives people a chance to watch how "real people" react in "real situations." They can follow the lives of complete strangers, which is strangely compelling. Especially since reality programs are usually not actually 100% real. Some shows slightly over-dramatize situations, while others are largely fictional.

But that's okay. They don't have to be real; they just have to be real enough.

I've definitely fallen victim to this. For class this week we were supposed to familiarize ourselves with lonelygirl15 and her universe. So I watched the first vlog she made. Then I watched the next one. And the next one. And so on and so forth, until I was about 40 videos in. They were simple videos in typical vlog format. Nothing much happened in them (at least in the beginning). I knew they weren't real. And yet I kept watching.

Maybe "reality" programming appeals to the voyeur in all of us. Maybe it's our ability to empathize with people. But we get sucked into the lives of these people, and I think part of it has to do with the illusion of reality involved. We can get into serial television shows (for me, it was Lost; try and tell me the pilot episode isn't compelling), but I think it's much easier for people to get hooked on reality TV because the people we're watching ARE, in fact, people, not characters. Most people can look past the fact that what they are watching isn't completely real because most stories require a suspension of disbelief.

Some shows require a lot of suspension of disbelief... Man, I miss it.

There's been a lot of talk about how reality shows are horrible programs and how they are destroying our brain cells (which I think is over-generalizing), but I do believe that reality programming can be a legitimate storytelling platform. Tons of people watch reality shows and are likely to continue doing so.

(NOTE: I wanted to clarify; the lonelygirl15 videos were scripted and fictionalized, they weren't really reality programming. But the videos presented themselves as real life so the illusion of reality as a way of drawing in viewers applies).