andrew.pilsch.com

I’ve been rabidly watching Project Runway on Wednesday nights. Whenever I mention to people who are “too smart” for reality TV, I find myself making justifications: “I learn a lot about clothes,” “it’s a lot smarter than other shows,” etc. Frankly, I think that may be a bunch of hogwash. I realize that I enjoy watching a bunch of bitchy, weird people backstabbing and bickering as much as the next American. This coming from a man who used to look down his nose at “the unwashed masses” and their reality TV.

I still teach an essay in my composition classes on the relationship between reality TV and the decline of real, democratic dialog in the United States. I still believe that reality TV is a symptom of a dangerous aspect of the American character that has run rampant since the turn of the new century. I still believe that.

At the same time, though, this stuff is surprisingly compelling. I once told my students that I watch television in a different manner than they do. At the time, it came out as incredibly arrogant (because it was), and I’m not so sure it was ever true. One of the things about being a graduate student in English (and I was warned this would happen) is that your ability to read for fun is just gone. I was reading an SF novel, the other day, “for fun” and realized that I could write several interesting conference papers on the plot of the novel. I find myself deconstructing television commercials, at times. The point of all this is that reality TV is highly resistant to argumentation.

What are you going to say about reality TV that it doesn’t already say about itself? It mirrors the outer-limits of capitalism in which we find ourselves living? I think that’s pretty obvious. It reworks the star system and the Frankfurt School’s theory of the Culture Industry? Duh. I guess my point is that reality TV seems to be about the dumbest you can make television that still, at least to some degree, revolves around being verbal (if you think about it, any further down the “bad TV” slide and you end up with shows were people just punch each other and yell). So, I suppose now the only reason I haven’t been watching reality TV isn’t out of some intellectual distaste for mass culture, it’s because reality TV has never offered me a way to fit base human instincts into my regime of dumb cultural enjoyment.

Bravo seems to have figured out how to change all of that. By dressing (hah) reality TV’s insistent, interpersonal conflict and passive-aggressive violence in the hip veneer of pseudo-intellectual pursuits (fashion, cooking), they’ve found a way to snare in even more viewers who always used to be “better” than reality TV. I guess I’m fine with that realization, although I pretty easily compromised my own former moral stance wrt reality TV (of course, it was probably never moral at all (beyond applying a veneer of morality to some sort of class struggle I used to enact by not watching the TV of the “masses”)). It’s one of those things that, now that I’m participating, I can’t figure out why I ever wasn’t. Which isn’t to say that I have some desire to watch Survivor now (is that even still on?). It’s just that I can now get my healthy dose of voyeuristic thrills in an environment that still allows for the smug superiority of “good taste.” Hooray!