The castmates of the television show “The Surreal Life” have always been desperate. In the first few seasons, viewers watched people like Tammy Faye Messner, Emanuel Lewis, Vanilla Ice, and MC Hammer cohabitate and begin to understand each other as more than just one-hit wonders. The show allowed viewers to see former-stars as people with complex pasts, goals, and ideas of self. It was a great show in that it had a completely original concept. The result of putting seven D-list or ex-A-list celebrities together in a house and filming their interactions was both insightful and sort of sad. But within recent years, the show has just become sad. Along with its realer counterpart “The Real World,” cast mates of these reality-based shows have become so aware of the potential of reality television’s potential to create names and start careers that people aren’t just auditioning for the chance to broadcast their problems or represent a specific American demographic, but to act a role in a sitcom. What was once partly a social experiment is now a channel to other reality shows.
“The Surreal Life” is now unwatchable. Not only do I not know who any of the cast members are, but I don’t care. Tammy Faye Messner and Emmanuel Lewis are interesting for their careers and personal stories of success and failure. But, in a backwards fashion, those cast on the show now have not even attained celebrity status. Instead, they’re hoping to find it on “The Surreal Life.”
One recent cast mate on “The Surreal Life” was the winner of the first season of “America’s Next Top Model,” who, on the show, met the man who played Peter Brady on “The Brady Bunch.” After the show ended, they had a spin-off together that detailed their relationship until their engagement. Flava Flav is another example of an unwatchably stupid character maximizing the potential of VH1’s “Celebreality.” Most of the people in my generation never knew of Flava Flav before his recent television appearances. Now, two spinoffs later, he’s much more prevalent.
Every week on “Celebrity Fit Club,” ex-celebrities try to lose weight for cash and merchandise prizes. It strikes me as odd that if these people are trying to maintain their status as celebrities, they’d be willing to accept prizes of monetary and status-based value. If we are to believe that these cast members aren’t just regular American people, shouldn’t they be all set financially? What separates these shows from “The Biggest Loser” or even “Deal or No Deal” is that every week, one ex-child star or another is kicked off the show and put into rehab. And the reasons for these celebrities’ weight gain are always attributed to some aspect of celebrity. Either they are tired of being looked at as sex symbols or they eat to feed the depression of losing fame. And they’re always losing weight to regain star status. They see this show as a means to a star-quality body, the sympathy vote from viewers, and the reestablishment of their names in our culture’s roster of the A-list.
I have to wonder why drug-addicted people sign up for this show only to be humiliated. If a former celebrity must make a cry for help, maybe it’s fitting to be done on television, as the American audience has been the only one supportive of and receptive to this person in the past. It’s humanizing to see someone struggle, but it doesn’t make me want to watch a film featuring the person. It’s just slightly unsettling and mostly unentertaining.
“So Notorious” describes itself as a reality-based sitcom featuring Tori Spelling. Every week, she is made fun of for being Aaron Spelling’s ugly daughter and for having had plastic surgery and one success as a cast mate on her father’s show “Beverly Hills 90210.” The show is scripted but only a slight step less reality-based than any of the other “Celebreality” shows. Through smart editing and implementing story arcs, celebrity-based reality shows are just as fabricated, and the cast mates are just as prone to casting themselves in the roles they once played instead of playing themselves.
I would like to see, and I think that I see, a turn-around in the genre of reality television. As celebrity-reality television has gone so far that it’s parodying itself, a new set of shows is emerging that will serve as reality counterparts to sitcom shows. For example, “The Real Housewives of Orange County” provides a real-life look, and an infinitely more entertaining look, at the lives of the women “Desperate Housewives” is based on. “Laguna Beach” is another example, as a response to “The OC.”
On the other hand, there really is no difference between any of these shows. None of them, even the least edited and most objectively-shot, portray any sort of reality. And the very implementation of the title “reality” hopes that we see something unfit with our own realities. While politicians and activist groups have worried that youths in America are becoming desensitized to violence and sexuality, I’m worried about our desensitization to extreme spending, obsession with beauty, self-obsession, and our basing worth on celebrity status. These are the weapons of what is now considered to be reality TV. A last example of interesting, at times educational, and generally much less harmful reality TV is “True Life” on MTV. But even they have been featuring episodes lately such as “I’m a Reality Television Star” and “I’m Getting My Big Break.” So I just hope my full-circle theory is somewhat accurate. Or maybe I’m just deluding myself.
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