What Is Reality TV Doing to Us?

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This month, the Bravo cable network rolls out Real Housewives of D.C., the latest installment of its enormously popular reality series tracing the misadventures of housewives in places like Atlanta, New York, and New Jersey. The series is riveting – a perfectly evolved medium for displaying the vanity of a shellacked and prosperous gaggle of 21st-century women. The backstabbing, spitefulness, tasteless consumption, and disregard for decorum – all with the necessary regional variations – make for excellent television. And our appetite for such shows appears limitless. Dozens of reality shows are now on the air, and a new one debuts every few months: shows about losing weight, finding love, taking care of passels of children, living life as a little person, renovating houses, and even trading spouses. If a culture gets the celebrities it deserves, what does it say about ours that we are so embedded in the ersatz lives of housewives, wife-swappers, and the prodigiously fertile?

The impulse to seek entertainment in the uniquely ordinary is nothing new. P.T. Barnum pioneered the art form in the 1830s when he exhibited a woman he claimed was the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington. This “real” attraction, along with others such as Tom Thumb, were democratic in that they invited spectators to see the individuals on display as real people with real stories rather than as performers. Barnum understood that by offering his audience glimpses of people who were extraordinary but real, he flattered their sense of themselves as knowledgeable spectators, unlikely to be fooled. Like Barnum’s audiences, we see ourselves as sophisticated connoisseurs of the “reality” we consume on television. We claim to know that reality shows are Potemkin villages, not spontaneous coffee klatches, and yet, because reality TV offers us the illusion of going behind the scenes, it also satisfies our voyeuristic inclinations.

Reality TV offers a peculiar kind of fame. The stars of the shows are rewarded merely for living their lives on screen. It offers the tantalizing promise that anyone can become a star. You, the viewer, remain unheralded and unknown only because a reality television crew hasn’t yet discovered you. A rare few of the participants in these shows, like Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who parlayed an appearance on Survivor: The Australian Outback into a job as co-host of The View, actually do struggle upward into more permanent perches in the entertainment industry. For most, however, enduring fame never materializes.

Such fame may be shallow or even tawdry by previous standards, but a vast number of us apparently yearn for it. A 2007 survey in the UK found that more than one in ten young people would drop out of school to be on reality TV. Almost half of the 16-to-19-year-olds surveyed “aspire to be a celebrity.” “We live in a celebrity culture and people are almost always willing to be on TV – even if it’s committing a crime,” the creator of Cops, one of the early reality shows, told the Washington Post.

As Leo Braudy noted in his excellent 1986 book The Frenzy of Renown, “The more open a society we have, the more professedly equal we are before the law, the greater the urge to personal distinction.” But distinction comes in many forms. As the competition to stand out has grown more intense, the line between fame and infamy has been eroded. Consider Michaele Salahi, one of the new D.C. housewives on Bravo’s show, who tricked herself out in a scarlet sari and, with cameramen in tow, crashed a state dinner at the White House last fall. Richard and Mayumi Heene went to jail last year for staging the disappearance of their son Falcon, whom they claimed had flown away in an experimental weather balloon. Earlier, the Heenes had made a pitch to several networks for a reality show about their family.

Nor is the vicarious experience of fame the whole story in our appetite for reality TV. A study published in Psychology Today in 2001 found that fans of shows such as Temptation Island, which puts committed couples in situations that test their fidelity, were notable for their “lack of interest in personal honor – they value expedience, not morality.” The attitude that most “separated the regular viewers of reality television from everyone else,” the study concluded, was “the desire for status.” Reality TV is also noteworthy for its high level of violent behavior. A recent study in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media found that reality shows served up, on average, 52 acts of aggression (physical, verbal, and relational) per hour, as compared to 33 per hour for scripted programs.

This new medium for feasting on the lurid details of others’ lives arrives at a time when we are showing less empathy for real people in the real world. A recent study from the University of Michigan found that “college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than those of 30 years ago, with the numbers plunging primarily after 2000.” As the New York Times summarized the researchers' speculation about this decline in empathy: “a millennial mixture of video games, social media, reality TV, and hyper-competition have left young people self-involved, shallow, and unfettered in their individualism and ambition.”

Decades ago, in The Minimal Self, the social critic Christopher Lasch noted our collective “fascination with extreme situations and with the possibility of applying their lessons to everyday life” – an apt anticipation of the reality TV phenomenon. He warned of the dangers of replacing “a reliable world of durable objects” with “a world of flickering images that make it harder and harder to distinguish reality from fantasy.”

Real life is a great deal messier than the predictable narratives of the “real” worlds we find on our television screens, and it presents ethical and social challenges that seldom intrude on the lives of pampered, self-absorbed suburban housewives. We are long past the point when anyone expects television to be edifying, but we still might pause to consider how the “flickering images” of reality TV are something more than an innocent diversion.

Christine Rosen is senior editor of the New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society and the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement and My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood.