To kick off this new column — The Oberlin Review’s Pop Culture Digest — let’s start from the top. And when it comes to super-sachacine mega-ton pop culture, reality TV is nothing but net.
“Joe Millionaire”: a group of women vie for the attention and purported wealth of a bumbling but relatively hunky construction worker making $19,000 a year (as the advertisements proclaim) the new show pushes to the extreme the sadism of reality TV as well as Fox’s estimation of the audience’s idiocy.
Leave it to Fox, the network of “When Animals Attack 3” and “Bachelorettes in Alaska,” to revel in such poor taste and sheer error.
But besides the show’s overwhelming layers of cliché and horrifying, mind-bending pastiche, discussed in the press and around water coolers everywhere, it’s interesting to consider “Joe Millionaire” in the broader. Has Fox really introduced something so different, so new as to keep the genre interesting? Will the show come out on top of this season’s crop of tricked-out reality-TV?
For reality TV it certainly is the season of the lame twist. Last month, the Entertainment Network (E!) also debuted “The Surreal Life,” a twisted version of Big Brother where washed-out demi-stars like Gary Coleman and MC Hammer share a house.
True, MTV’s “The Real World” series emerged as compelling real-life TV long before “Survivor” and the reality vogue. But today, even MTV has, for the most part, either plunged its line of reality shows into weak semi-competitive sports vehicles that rehash past cast members (“Real World vs. Road Rules Battle of the Sexes”) or let its flagship series (“World,” “Rules”) fall into salacious, hard-bodied orgy-fests.
ABC’s “The Bachelorette,” on the other hand, has forgone overt plot-twists to maintain a “wholesome” appeal. In this climate, however, the lack of twist can only be considered a twist in itself. The show remains as vacuous as the rest.
It seems, like in most markets, the space for high-cost over-the-top productions is rather small. Indeed, the market refuses to support too many brands, as the dismal failure of some past reality TV shows has shown us. But more importantly, thinking of the reality TV space as a market, which it certainly is, evokes the question: What about the low-cost, generic equivalents to the big networks’ heavily-marketed products, the Wal-Marts to the Pottery Barns, the Pretty in Pinks to the Gone With the Winds?
The WB’s moderately-budgeted “Blind Date,” one of the first on the block, follows sometimes amorous but most often surly blind-daters on their first dates. TV Guide has show synopses for the program like “A sophisticated man and a Hooters’ employee swim topless in the ocean, daters use body paints and play pool,” or “A college student looks for another woman to join in on her date, daters are thrown out of a bar for trying to make their own martinis.” And my favorite is “A basketball player attempts to get a Russian model into the Jacuzzi, a woman returns to the show in hopes of finding love with an oyster eater.” The show is straightforwardly filmed and there can be sessions of painfully boring, idiotic chitchat, but the editors take some creative liberties through sarcastic captions and utterly silly animations.
The producers of “Blind Date,” encouraged by its success against the major networks’ dating shows, quickly spun off a similar program, “The 5th Wheel,” where a group of daters compete to prove their romantic and sexual desirability, determined by a vote at the end of each episode. The effect is kind of like a democratic potlatch — complete with string bikinis and hot tubs.
These “lower” programs, including “Elimi-date” and “Extreme Dating,” among others, share similar stripped-down formats, each with a slight spin — for example, the personality of the host. The result is a strong pool of almost-unaltered reality TV that doesn’t require heavy theatrics to make sense or be enjoyable.
The interest in reality TV is its supposed realness, its suggestion of reality. The point is not fantasy (although the television medium does perpetuate a certain amount of that) but reflection, an unattached and enjoyable self-psychoanalysis. These shows should be entertaining but disposable. The goods ones proffer passing enjoyment without excess, and without treating the viewer and Americans like a complete simpletons.