It’s a weeknight, and I’m running out of ways to pass the time that should be spent doing homework. I decide on giving in to the trap of primetime television. As I turn on the TV, I see forty-four midgets and an elephant each pulling an airplane in a race. It’s looking like the little people will prevail, but I don’t watch long enough to see the outcome. Crass, pointless, and ridiculous: welcome to the world of reality television.

Clicking from channel to channel, it soon becomes obvious: it’s painful to watch more than a couple minutes of reality TV at a time. I feel cheated when what I’m seeing is nothing like the reality many of us face everyday. I don’t live in a house full of thirty insane, overdramatic people with sex drives big enough to create a small country. I don’t have a line of girls trying to take my hand in marriage (thankfully), and I don’t aspire to become a pop star anytime soon.

Yet the millions of viewers addicted to such shows have created a global obsession with reality TV. The mentality of television networks today is simple: if you put enough people with social problems in a room together or come up with ridiculous enough concepts, America will watch. And they’re usually right. People will watch anything if it’s presented and marketed in the right way. They will watch contestants eat pig testicles, or little kids try to run a town. I’m not saying that these aren’t at least mildly amusing, but “mildly amusing” is the problem itself: such shows are nothing more. What can be gained from spending an evening watching this trash? No knowledge, little insight, and a wasted three hours. Reality shows are like a slacker with great potential. They could be used to convey deeper messages, yet instead show just what can already be seen on the surface.

Reality television stands in its own distinctive category, somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. The participants and contestants in the shows are real people with real actions, yet in many cases they are scripted or set up for a specific outcome. The majority of the shows are based on competition, and the contestants are carefully chosen to give the appearance of diversity. Yet nobody is better at perpetuating stereotypes than creators of these shows. The array of contestants never seems without the crazy token minority, the dumb blonde, a jock or two, and a drama queen. As sad as it is, a large number of people in this country rely primarily on television to get a sense of other types of people and their lifestyles. It’s easy to brush sitcoms and dramas off as untrue, yet when people watch reality shows they judge the “characters” and events in front of them. Some take the biased images of those portrayed in the shows and apply them to their real-life relationships and interactions.

For reality TV to be authentic, it should show people dealing with the quandaries and pressures actually faced by its viewers. There’s enough entertainment found in most people’s day-to-day lives to provide ample material, yet the focus of most programs remains on outlandish, un-relatable subjects. Where’s the show following a flat-out broke man trying to get by, or the show that breaks stereotypes rather than creates them? As soon as reality television takes a few steps up from the sewer, I’ll watch it. For the meantime, I’d rather see static.

Click here to read “She Said: Reality TV”