“Reality”-based game shows, by no means a U.S.-driven or U.S.-invented phenomenon, may recruit individuals who appear truly random. In practice, the contestants are selected for extreme personality features that the format elicits quickly. The future annals of reality TV will tell how little time it took for shows like Survivor to abandon their original regular-folks pretense — it was a matter of weeks in the case of the U.S. Survivor. Within months the more typical reality-competition show was something like Real World/Road Rules Challenge, i.e., a cauldron of freewheeling pathology spiced with sex and violence.
At any rate, everyone who appears on an actual television program has passed an implicit “can be on television” test for looks. The test is not strict: I was a semi-regular on a deep-cable panel show, and look at me. But try walking in the downtown of any major city and counting the number of people who have tics or wens or facial asymmetries that would disqualify them outright from TV. Needless to say, you don’t hear quite the same range of accents you do at a food-court MacDonald’s, either. It is probably to the good that we are disconnecting from television as a total environment, a multidimensional image of society plunged into at birth: those of us who were reared under those conditions must have weird, unfixable blind spots.
Colby Cosh, “On the ignominious downfall of Jared from Subway”, National Post, 2015-08-20.
May 10, 2017
QotD: “Reality” TV
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