I’ve come to realize because I’ve been watching about 18 or so seasons of Top Chef on demand, all of which I missed when I stopped watching television 10 years ago, that there are several types of reality shows.
The talent shows: these would be Project Runway, Top Chef, Blown Away (glass blowing), and there are probably some others are the upper tier of reality shows. (I’m not including the singing and “talent”‘ competitions for reasons below.) In these craft shows, there is less of a need to focus on characters and whether you like or dislike someone than there is to observe how they make their work and in some cases, art. I’ve always enjoyed these ones and I recognized right away that the main reason is that the focus was on skill, craft, talent and imagination. Sometimes you could get angry about a character. In the early iterations of Top Chef, I think the producers thought they had to imitate the conflicts of the lesser reality shows.
One I remember, is Marcel on Top Chef was a highly disliked “character” by both the people on the show and the people who watched it. He was an aficionado of chemical cooking, which is (put very simply) using acidic foods to “cook” delicate foods like eggs. And foam. Ugh. He put foam on everything which I think now, many years later, has gone the way of blackened fish. Anyway, they tried to shave his head on one episode and — this was kind of eye opening watching it so many years later — the guy who wrestled him to the ground was eliminated for having put his hands on Marcel. When they told him he had broken the rules and was leaving the show, his mouth dropped in disbelief. And I was thinking, again, of how bullying seems so very innocent to the people that perpetuate it. But in that same episode, after Marcel got away from the bigger guy that was holding him down, he went to his bedroom and slammed the door and was clearly very upset. Bullying is only fun for the person who does the bullying. I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand. But this is a very old episode and filmed long before “Me Too” and the trend to sue anyone who even puts a fingertip on your shoulder.
The second level of the reality show is the sort of “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” competition, where people mostly try to make it to the end and are sometimes put through meaningless tasks and feats of strength and so on. This would be Survivor, Big Brother, The Bachelor and other dating shows, and also I think, what are called the talent shows: America’s Got Talent and American Idol. The Miss America, Miss Universe, Mrs. America, Mr. Leather, all the state competitions (Miss Ohio, Miss California), and even the Little Miss competitions, also belong in this category. All of them are either simply endurance competitions or come very close to endurance, rather than talent. What is called “talent” is almost nothing of the kind, except in rare instances. And of course there is a whole “let’s make fun of these people,” aspect that I think includes the Little Miss and Mister competitions across the country.
[As an aside, one thing about the brilliant but all too brief, “Little Miss Sunshine,” was the end. And I listened to the directors commentaries about finding an ending and it was pretty clear they didn’t know what to do after the Hoover family more or less destroyed the entire competition. They’re all sitting outside an office because the bad guy (the woman who runs the show) has called the police and they are, presumably, being detained but not arrested. They are posed like they are in a handcuff chain, but in fact, they’re all just sitting there like that. The cop comes out, says, “You can leave if you promise never to enter Olive into another Little Miss competition in the state of California.” They agree and then make their getaway in their broken down VW. Why does the state give that woman the power to do that? I understand why they agreed with it. Nobody gets charged with disorderly conduct or something like, but really, since it was a private event, the pageant already had the ability to ban them from ever entering again. And being a private event, the worst the police could actually do was trespass them from the property, which would have been up to the hotel, not the pageant who rented the space. They could not be arrested or charged with disorderly conduct because it wasn’t public. They didn’t assault anyone except maybe the creepy MC. They just disrupted the event and stopped when the music went off. There was another encounter with the police in that show (Dean Norris from Breaking Bad, ironically), and it was another example of police overreach. Both episodes bothered me.]
The difference between the 3 types that I’ve identified, and there’s nuance in all of it, so you could say it’s a all a part of a spectrum of reality, is that when people of the most upper tier of these shows lose that week’s test, it is sometimes for a dish or dress or creation that is, by itself, absolutely stunning. It’s like when you have a year with five truly great, perhaps groundbreaking, films for best picture. It’s heartbreaking to see someone of that caliber get kicked off. And I’ve noticed that toward the end of these shows, the contests are, in fact, much consoled by the fact that they are cooking at the top level in the field. They just have an enormously talented group of competitors.
For the second group, you usually only care because you come to like or relate to the “character” the person is playing on the program. Survivor tries to promote the idea that these players are “cunning” or “strategic” but they’re not. It’s totally random, and some very astute cultural critic said, after the first episode of the first season of Survivor aired, that Richard Hatch, who sat in a tree and contributed absolutely nothing to the group, but could see what was going on, would ultimately be the winner. With Survivor and some of the others, I’m not really sure that anyone plays a good game. But they all act like they do. Lately the Mr. Beast contests, which generally start out with 1,000 people who are “given” 10,000 each, totalling $1,000,000 are narrowed down on day one to 500. The rule is that the people kicked out of the competition sacrifice “their” $10,000 into a pot, so on day one that pot is $500,000. It continues this way until there are only two contestants left and, shockingly, $998,000 in the pot. But what Mr. Beast did, at least in the second go around, is he gave people opportunities to take some of that pot along the way. This led to some of the dumbest people ever to appear on television complaining that the other contestants weren’t playing “fair.” By definition, that is simply not the case. If the guy offers you the chance to take $250,000 of the million dollar pot, take it. It’s not unfair because the contestants don’t set the rules. But Christianity being such a malignant influence and its belief that it owns “integrity” and “compassion” and “fairness,” this idea that playing according to the rules of the game is somehow dishonorable has seeped in.
Anyway, this second group reminds me of the work I referenced, “They Shoot Horses Don’t They,” a movie based on a book by Horace McCoy, which starred Jane Fonda back in 1969. It was about a dance marathon,, which they used to have all over the country, where people would try to dance for days on end and other people would pay money to come see them and root for their favorite team to win, and so on. Those competitions flourished during the Great Depression and their re-emergence twenty or twenty five years ago as reality shows made me think that we were entering another era of economic desperation — where the haves have taken away so much from the rest of us, in the form of credit, mostly, that people have resorted to these competitions to try to make ends meet.
And then there is the trash reality show, which I would attribute almost exclusively to Andy Cohen, who apparently owns, somehow an entire cable network channel called Bravo. Bravo was founded to “bring the fine arts and performing arts” to the vast cable television world where every conceivable thing was going to have a channel. I remember a teacher (this was in 1982, before cable came marching into our homes — releasing cable into our world was another long political story full of grift and payola and corruption, but it’s too long to go into) talking about a channel where you could learn French or another language; or a channel to study physics. In fact, I think they started off this way: the History channel, the National Geographic Channel, Turner Classic Movies, News channels, and so on. But cable is just a vast network of commercials now, and even HBO “it’s not television” doesn’t really exist anymore. But the “real housewives” of ______ name your city, seems to me to be a pointless exploitation of the worst. It’s gay cruelty without the camp, and without the camp, gay cruelty is just Joan Rivers in her “Fashion Police” show which was, obviously, on cable, on E! online.
[E! was originally a cable station called “Movietime,” which was, no lie, an advertising channel that showed movie trailers and previews for upcoming entertainment. That’s all it did. But a lot of people like movie trailers because they’re, I guess, mini movies in a way. It’s like reading an advance notice about a book you think you’re going to love, or, one that’s going on today 9/9/26, this Elizabeth Holmes documentary that just premiered at Telluride Film Festival. Movietime was taken over and turned into something more gossip oriented, culminating, in my opinion, with the disgusting sight of Joan Rivers at her absolute meanest. She was always mean, but in exactly the way that gay men can be mean, but maintained, like most gay men, a bit of respect for the people she ripped to shreds. Kathy Griffin still does it, although I she’s a little edgier and there are plenty of times Kathy Griffin laces into people she doesn’t respect at all. Anyway, like all this cable and political, it degenerated into an unthinking bowl of shit.]