Reality TV: Guilty Pleasure or Window To Our Souls?
A UMNS-UMC.org Report
by Ray Waddle
IT'S BEEN CALLED THE CRACK cocaine of television, cheap to produce and addictive to watch. Reality TV – is it really a bad thing?
It seems to be taking over. The TV season this fall will feature another wave of new reality shows. Already, prime time is buzzing with a dozen programs loosely termed “reality TV,” a tag that describes unscripted situations involving non-actors in predicaments that require charm or shrewdness to succeed, usually for love or money.
The success of “Survivor,” “Real World,” “Joe Millionaire” and others has made reality TV a defining media genre of the 21st century. For better or worse, it's here to stay. Whether they tune in or not, people of faith ought to pay attention to what the church might learn from it all, according to observers who monitor the frontier between pop culture and spiritual life.
“Yes, they're a guilty pleasure,” says Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at United Methodist-related Syracuse (N.Y.) University.
“Clearly, a lot of these programs reflect the less noble aspects of the human spirit. Yet there are things to be learned about human nature and the human spirit on some of these shows.”
Take “Temptation Island,” for instance – the reality show on which committed couples test their relationships by meeting good-looking unattached singles. It sounds like a bad idea, Thompson says, yet the show turns out to be a modern version of an ancient moral tale, he says.
“If you sit down and watch, you see it's a retelling of themes from Genesis or Faust: If you mess around with temptation, it's a bad thing. In the end, it's a very traditional message,” he says.
Detractors are not hard to find. Even some Hollywood industry insiders have lashed out against reality TV, calling it shameless, undignified, an insult to viewer intelligence even as it rakes in massive ratings and profits for the networks. Reality TV, critics say, reinforces gender stereotypes, glorifies cutthroat behavior and deceives viewers into thinking these highly edited shows are raw, unfiltered reality.
“It's hard to get honest-to-goodness real human interaction when you know the cameras are rolling,” says Ed Vitagliano of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss.
“It's a modern-day freak show,” he says. “Viewers sit back and watch people make fools of themselves. We all like to rubberneck at the scene of an accident. That's what these shows are like. But to waste our time this way shows just how bored we really are. It's awful to see how much time is being vacuumed out of our lives.”
Some 40 million viewers saw the climactic episode of “Joe Millionaire” earlier this year. Reality TV is, for now, part of the cultural landscape and daily office chat. Reality dating shows, like “Blind Date” or “Anything for Love,” emotionally connect with audiences. It's not difficult to see why, Thompson says.
“The greatest story in one's life is the search for that significant other,” he says. “But we're used to seeing utopian versions in movies or on TV. On reality TV, what we're seeing is courtship, warts and all. Some of these shows are incredibly stupid, but the American dating jungle is incredibly stupid.”
Reinventing TV
One culture watcher says the religious critics should try to understand reality TV's clues to spiritual life today, instead of making easy condemnations.
“Reality TV is reinventing TV,” says the Rev. Leonard Sweet, a United Methodist author and futurist. “It's a reflection of a larger cultural shift taking place. It's relationship TV. This is a relationship culture, an interactive culture. People want to learn how to do relationships, and the pathetic thing is the churches aren't teaching them, so they turn to TV.”
Sweet says the culture is moving in what he calls an “EPIC” direction, referring to the need for experience, participation, image-richness and connection.
Increasingly, people expect interactivity at work and play. With TV, they want to shape what they are watching and give input, not merely accept a packaged program, Sweet says. Traditional TV is based on an old consumer model: It's produced by professional actors and scriptwriters, with viewers expected to consume it like any other commodity.
“Reality TV's energy is here to stay,” Sweet says. “There may be a lot of failures, but it's moving TV into an interactive medium. There were 100 million votes cast for ‘American Idol.' It's a karaoke culture. We watch these shows because we think, ‘It could have been me.'”
There are parallels with the Christian message, he says. The old consumer model shaped the gospel message into a series of propositions to be swallowed, not experienced.
“The church has made truth into a proposition and not a relationship,” Sweet says. “The modern world made Jesus the answer, a solution. No, he is the truth, the way and the life, a mystery to be lived. What people want is not so much to ‘believe' in God but to experience God. The church has to come to terms with this. Instead of talking about a singles ministry, why not have a relationship ministry? Why not make worship more EPIC?”
Empowering viewers
Another media watcher says church groups might use the reality trend on TV to launch a discussion about the real world of community ills and solutions.
“I'd use reality TV as a jumping-off point to ask what's real in our neighborhood, what's real in our lives and our society,” says Elizabeth Thoman, head of the Center for Media Literacy, based in Los Angeles.
The Center for Media Literacy promotes media education, aiming to help people demystify the power of the media by teaching them to look critically at the media's aims, values and business pressures. That includes reality TV.
“You can condemn it or empower people to understand it,” she says. “There's no point in condemning it. You don't change media, you change the climate in which media operate, then media will change. Social change happens far more powerfully when you change the viewer.”
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