This weekend as I've been home with Kaleb, I've really noticed how few television programs there are anymore worth watching. On the weekends, Cox Cable should just give us two days free, since most everything showing is absolute garbage. We have 70 channels of TV, and I can't find anything to watch! I shouldn't have to pay for extended service and hundreds of channels just to find one or two with worthwhile programming!
The first problem I have with weekend programming is the number of channels that air movies one after another all day instead of the normal hour or half-hour shows. I'm a single mom with a toddler; I do not have time to sit and watch an entire movie uninterrupted! Leave the movies to the movie channels! But, while the movies are a problem on the weekends, there's a much bigger issue.....one TV style that is flooding the airwaves and ruining the quality of television:
"Reality" TV!
It all started in 1992 when MTV started a show called "The Real World" that followed a group of young adults thrown into a posh urban/downtown apartment together. Real? Hardly. Seriously, in the real world, when would you ever find 6-8 beautiful young adults (men and women) who've never met all moving into an apartment together? It would never work, especially not when you're hooking up with a different roommate every couple of days. If "The Real World" was the real world, the rate of homicide would increase dramatically.....or maybe just the rate of STDs.
In 1995, Road Rules came along. I never actually watched this show, so I'll just quote Wikipedia here.
Road Rules, MTV's second reality show, debuted on July 19, 1995. The series followed six strangers between the ages of 18 and 24 (five strangers in the first four seasons) after stripping them of their money and putting them on an RV traveling from location to location only guided by a set of clues and a mission to complete at each location. It was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2001. The ground-breaking series was a pioneer in travel/adventure/reward reality television.
Just reading this, I can tell you that that's not reality, either, unless you are homeless. Or a "Carnie."
Then, in 2000, along came Survivor. It launched the "modern" reality show craze, and reality TV has been around ever since. How does Survivor work? You take a group of strangers, split them into "tribes" and give them tasks to complete as a group. You pit everyone against one another, eliminating one person a week, and offering a $1,000,000 prize as incentive to be the meanest, sneakiest person on the show. Lovely. Just lovely.
And, nowadays, all kinds of television stations are marketing their own brands of reality TV. There are shows made out to be competitions, shows to create romance, shows to follow people at their jobs, and shows that follow the lives of "normal" families.....little people, fat families, handicapped people, families with lots and lots of kids, and people with various types of mental instabilities.
I cannot say enough times how much I detest nearly every form of reality TV. Reality TV is everywhere these days. None of it even approaches resembling actual reality, and most of it is simply detestable. What follows is
The Worst of The Worst of Reality TV.
Since I consider all of the following shows to be equally detestable, I'm not going to try to rank them. Instead, to keep it simple, I'm just going to list them alphabetically.
Grumpy old man runs a motorcycle shop with his two dim-witted, lazy sons. The shop is staffed by New Yorkers with bad attitudes. The lazy sons screw things up. Grumpy old man yells, sons yell back. Eventually, some decent motorcycles get built. Entire show resembles a drunken bar brawl.
They're lumberjacks. They wear flannel. They use chain saws. They cut down big trees. Yeah.....
Tyra Banks: Proof that sometimes a pretty girl with a 5-acre forehead is nothing more than a pretty girl with a 5-acre forehead who needs to just shut up and smile for the camera. She tries (and fails) to add drama to the elimination portions of the show by speaking in a cadence that is strongly reminiscent of James T. Kirk. Yeah, I get it that girls need positive role models, but surely this sort of superficial emphasis isn't what we want young girls to focus on.
The classic tail of boy meets girl gets violently screwed from behind! One handsome man is moved into a house full of gold-digging super-model-type women. Within the first few weeks, the hot tub becomes toxic with the "love juices" of all the women, and in the end the group is narrowed down to one woman who is deemed to be the "perfect mate" for the guy. After the show, the relationships mostly don't work out. Really? You mean creating a human pressure cooker isn't the way to create "Happily Ever After"?!?! Well, who'd have guessed?
Re-read description for #4. Reverse all gender roles. The lovely bachelorette is typically the runner-up from the previous season of The Bachelor. At the end of the season, her #2 will become the following season's bachelor, and this vicious cycle will repeat over and over and over again.
A bunch of fat people decide to get thin, on television, for a cash prize. Guess what? If you offered the full (free) support of personal trainers and dietitians and a cash prize, most fat people would be willing to slim down. Heck, I'd even take that deal! But I still wouldn't wanna do it on television.
It's like the Orkin man mated with a Hell's Angels biker chick and gave birth to these people. But, aside from their wardrobes and "bad-ass" attitudes, they're just exterminators. They take care of termites, squirrels, rats, birds, and any other varmints that might be bugging you. It's gross, just like any other exterminator's job.
These people look like close relatives of the folks from #7. The lead guy (with the ratty blonde mullet from hell) and his team, including his trailer-trash-looking wife track down hookers and druggies who have jumped bail. It's like watching "Cops" but without the laws. They carry on trite, cliché, heart-to-heart conversations with the criminals as they haul them back to jail.
There's also another show on another channel with the same format as this one, called Hoarders. They're going to share this spot on the list. The obsession with hoarding material possessions is a very real mental illness, and not one that should be paraded around on TV for anyone's enjoyment. These people need help, not publicity. Another show that's not on my list, about which I have similar opinions, is Intervention. That show is about people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol and who need real help, not TV exposure. In addition to these, Animal Planet airs a show called Animal Hoarders about people who collect cats or dogs or other pets until they and the animals are all living in deplorable conditions and the health of all involved is in jeopardy. I'm just not ok with television executives making money by airing non-educational shows about people with genuine mental disorders.
It's a group of truckers who drive a particularly risky route across the frozen waters of the North. Sure, I understand that it takes guts to drive in an area where you could encounter all sorts of dangerous conditions. But, as for it's television suitability, well, it's people driving big-rig trucks.
Once upon a time a neurotic, bitchy woman married an immature, narcissistic man. The first time the woman got pregnant, they became the parents of twin girls. Then, though the miracle of IVF, the woman became pregnant again. This time she gave birth to 6 babies: three girls and three boys. The man and woman raised their family. The children were overindulged because their father was more playmate than parent, and they were poorly-behaved and bratty because their mother spent more time bitching at their father over petty issues than she spent teaching her children to be sweet and have manners. One day, some TV executives from TLC offered the man and woman a deal for lots of money if they would turn their family's lives over to be filmed for a TV show. They agreed. With the money the woman hired a nanny to help take care of the eight children, and the man hired the same nanny to have sex with him. The children got brattier, the woman got bitchier, and the man got laid. Oh, yeah, this is the image we want the world to see when they think of American families!
Three baby-faced narcissists sell multi-million-dollar properties to ridiculously rich people, then they buy themselves nice cars and clothes and hang out with their narcissistic peers.
First off, there is nothing real about these women.....not their boobs, not their butts, not their lips or their lack of wrinkles and stretch marks, and not their hair color. Their tans were built up in a tanning salon. Their personalities are even fake. What is real about them? Their shoes, their clothes, their jewelry, their handbags, and their better-than-you attitudes. As for being housewives, that is true only because they are wives who don't work. With the money they have, though, they have people hired to do the cooking and the cleaning and the errands. In today's bad economy, this line of shows is insulting to every hard-working American woman, even the ones who don't work outside their homes.
If even half of the hairstyles created on this show were styles that normal people might consider wearing in public, this show wouldn't be on the list. For the most part, these are talented hairstylists who are brought onto the show to take hairdressing to a grotesque extreme. They create hairstyles with bird cages in them and huge feather plumes and lots of other items that have no business being twisted into a hairstyle. The end results are often styles that resemble, most closely, ugly sculptures.
I cannot even begin to imagine what type or quantity of drugs must have been involved in the creation of this show. "I know! Let's take a big house, decorate it in a funky retro style and fill it full of gaudy furniture. Then, let's have a half-dozen or so celebrity has-beens and almost-weres move in and see what kind of crazy things happen!" This was a bad idea from the get-go. I think the best single word to describe this program would have to be "tacky."
Sad. Grotesque. Sickening. Disgusting. Disturbing. This show is the one that bothers me the most of all the shows on the list. There is never a reason for little girls to be dressed up like grown women and paraded around in short skirts wearing fake, over-sized teeth and hairstyles big enough to require at least two cans of hairspray. The mothers of these little girls should be jailed and beaten repeatedly. I have no problem with kids being on stage in plays at school or church or in a community theater. I can see the benefits in little girls learning how to carry themselves and be confident young ladies. But I've seen these shows. The little girls get tired and want to go home, but their mothers keep plucking away at their eyebrows and quizzing them on how to answer judging questions and walk properly and sing and dance.....even while the little girls cry from sheer exhaustion. Little girls should act like little girls. They should have tea parties with teddy bears, and swing on swings, and play with Legos and baby dolls and coloring crayons. While most of us parents are wishing our kids would just stop growing up so fast, these little girls' parents are teaching them to act like grown-ups and catering to their little princesses' growing egos. When these girls are 30 and shooting heroin between their toes to stay skinny, their parents will shake their heads and not have any clue how it happened. I'm so glad I have a son. If I had ever had a daughter, there's no way I'd have let her do this.
Normally, this type of show wouldn't have made it onto this list. The contestants on this show have spent years developing their skills. So why, then, is it on my list? Because it invaded the History Channel. I already had to tolerate Ice Road Truckers filling time slots on the History Channel, and now there are two "reality" shows taking the place of what could be really interesting documentary-style TV. Dang it. We should create one or two channels and let them be entirely devoted to reality TV, and ban this junk from all other channels. When I turn on the TV, I want to see something scripted that isn't even trying to pretend to be reality. I want to see actors and actresses portraying characters and speaking lines written by television writers.
You'll notice that there are lots of reality shows that did not make the list. Many of them are shows or competitions in which the participants have spent years and years honing a skill or talent and now have a show to display what they can do. I'm fine with that! Shows like Top Chef and Cake Boss and Iron Chef are full of people who've devoted their lives to learning the finer aspects of cooking. Top Design and Design Star are shows about interior designers. Launch My Line and Project Runway contestants have worked to learn the ins and outs of clothing design and marketing. I'm even ok with talent shows like America's Got Talent, American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, Nashville Star, and others like these. The performers may be amateurs, but they have worked to develop their talents to a point worthy of performance. However, even though these shows didn't make my list, I rarely watch any of them. Once I've seen someone's act in one episode, I don't really want to keep watching the same things over and over. With the shows that produce a physical result (like clothing or a decorated room or a cake or a meal), I like to watch the last 10 minutes or so to see the finished results. The process of how they were created really doesn't hold my attention.
So, that's that. Overall, I think reality TV is a waste of far too many television time slots. I wish we could all return to a time when sitcoms and dramas dominated the airwaves. I wish animation was still well-drawn and not so full of fart jokes. I wish TV were still as good as it was when I was a kid and too young to appreciate a good things while I had it. I want to return to a time when MTV and VH1 actually still played music, and the cartoon network only played cartoons (did you know they show "real people" TV now too?). I want to go back to when the Disney Channel didn't have commercials during the shows and half of Nickelodeon programs showed people getting "slimed."
TV used to be good. I remember.
[This review expresses only the thoughts and opinions of the blog author. It was not paid for nor solicited by the company/product/entity being reviewed, nor do they offer any endorsement of the opinions contained herein.]
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