![\"\"](\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/Reality-TV-shows.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI watch as little television as I can, and most of it by accident.<\/p>\n
Whenever I do<\/em> catch an eyeful, it usually consists of one of three things: a talking heads news channel, organized sportsball, or a Reality TV show. The first I try to ignore (they’re usually triangulated on the tabloid newspapers with added eye candy, then dumbed down: as information sources this century, TV news channels are useless). The sportsball I leave to my spouse (who is prone to lecturing me interminably about Manchester City). But the latter phenomenon \u2014 Reality TV \u2014 has all the grisly attention-grabbing potential of a flaming school bus careening out of control into a public execution: I basically have to leave the room in a hurry to avoid having my eyeballs sucked right out of my head by the visual media equivalent of internet clickbait.<\/p>\n
What makes Reality TV shows so addictive?<\/p>\n
The sector is dominated by a couple of competing recipes. As in so many mature markets, there’s an 80\/20 split between a dominant incumbent and an insurgent that isn’t quite successful enough to overturn a monopoly but is too tenacious to die. Think Android\/iPhone, or car\/pick-up truck (that latter died about a decade ago in the US).<\/p>\n
In the case of rTV shows, the 20% insurgent is about people demonstrating competence. Mythbusters<\/em> was the classic competence-porn show (although it deteriorated into the explosion-of-the-week club after a few seasons): using science!!!<\/em> and workshop\/lab work to evaluate the plausibility of urban legends. Other competence rTV shows include: a team of dudes acquire a car wreck and restore it to good-as-new condition, a former special forces soldier\/scout troop leader is dumped on a desert island and demonstrates survival skills, and so on.<\/p>\n
But the other 80% of rTV shows are in<\/em>competence porn.<\/p>\n
Incompetence porn Reality TV, as pioneered by Big Brother<\/em>, usually aims to get the audience to laugh at or mock the participants in a contest designed to plumb the depths of humiliation. Instead of dropping a fit expedition leader on a desert island, the show dumps a bunch of washed-up B-list celebs in a wilderness of mosquitos and no soft toilet paper. Or perhaps it’s a bunch of Armani-suited sociopaths in a boardroom where they’re expected to pitch business start-up proposals at a washed-up B-list business celeb like Alan Sugar (or, in the American version of The Apprentice<\/em>, a certain mobbed-up New York property speculator with shady Russian banking connections). Back-stabbing is a given in the celebrity\/sociopath driven variant of rTV, as incompetent contestants are shoved out of the show at every episode until only the most obliviously egocentric remains.<\/p>\n
(Note that the survivor selection criterion isn’t “competence”, be it at wilderness survival or boardroom brown-nosing: it’s entertainment value. Because these shows, despite the name, aren’t about reality, they’re showbiz.)<\/p>\n
But these aren’t the worst.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t watch much TV at all … after catching the Superbowl on Sunday, I may not turn on the TV until the NFL preseason gets underway in the summer, so my impressions of reality TV offerings are gathered second- or third-hand at best. That said, I do recall watching some very early reality TV […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[262,248,101],"class_list":["post-54574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","tag-culture","tag-realitytv","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ece","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54576,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54574\/revisions\/54576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}