Reality TV or TV Reality?

With the emergence of reality TV has come the exposure of how pitiful people really are. Whether it’s peoples obsessive and generally unattainable pursuit of stardom on American Idol or their increasingly shallow views of the world on any MTV Reality show, the state of our society being reflected in these things indicates we are some pretty pathetic creatures.

The fascinating thing about reality television is that it is just as reflective of its audience as fictional TV is. My girlfriend watches the show Gossip Girl, a program based on a hit series of books about an upper-class community’s drama-plagued and sex-crazed youth population. (SIDE NOTE: I understand it’s just an escape for her as TV/Movies are for many people, but the show is a perfect example of culture unfortunately being displayed in entertainment. And, the show is just a glorified soap opera for teens. The acting is atrocious, and the plotlines….ugh…but anyways…) It is based completely on fiction, so one would think individuals can’t possibly be as manipulative, untrustworthy, selfish and thoroughly immoral in real life as they are portrayed in the show. That assumption was quickly proven false by a girl sitting behind me in my economics class. For the first 15 minutes before the class began, she gossiped about her group of friends—and I use the term very loosely—and I could have sworn I was watching an episode of G.G. with my gf. The lies, the sex, the unfaithfulness, and all the petty bullshit that makes me want to stay inside for good, all in one casual chat between two girls behind me, infiltrating my life, my reality. I wish I was imagining this stuff, I really do, but it’s the sad truth about the time in which we are living.

One show that was also sadly reflective of daily life was one of my favorites, The Wire. The show depicted inner-city Baltimore in every walk of life, from the hood rats, the police force and government, to the harbor life and educational system. The 2 driving forces behind the production of the show had worked in Baltimore in varying, yet always integral, capacities and brought what they saw to what they created on screen, making it so real you could swear it was a documentary on the city. The corruption of the politicians was so complete. The conditions of the schools were so heart-breaking. The police force was so jaded. (I asked my friend who recently joined the force if any TV program he had seen portrayed officers accurately. Without knowing I watched the show, he looked at me and asked, “Ever seen the Wire?...it’s like that.”) The quality of the inner city as a whole and overall mood of the show was so excruciatingly dark that a person would be under the impression that a place like this could not possibly exist. Still, underneath the show’s utter brilliance was the cold hard fact that the world within The Wire mirrored real life.


Acknowledging the incredible parallels between television and the “real world’ is more of a morale-demolisher than it is a revelation. There are still TV shows I enjoy, those that truly embody escapism. I am seeing, however, that the vast majority of programming is to close to a cruel reality I would probably rather not be viewing at all.