Our weird reality is killing reality TV
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Reality TV originally thrived because it offered an escape from everyday life. We indulged in epic rollercoaster romances, shameless debauchery, petty entanglements, and the guilty pleasure of rooting for 'shade-throwing' self-obsessed villains who seemed hellbent on taking someone down each season. For roughly 43 blissfully chaotic minutes, we entered a world where the worst of human behavior could be enjoyed safely, from a distance, and, most important, turned off at will. In the end, it perversely left us feeling better, even relieved, about the predictable ordinariness of our own lives.
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But our current political reality — starring its own egotistical villains running amok and creating havoc — has become so chaotic and theatrical that reality TV now feels dull by comparison.
Sigmund Freud, in 'Civilization and Its Discontents,' argued that our primal instincts, driven by sex (pleasure/procreation) and aggression (power/survival), are in conflict with the external demands of civilization — the social order that keeps us functioning as a collective society. In short: Our rawest individualistic urges are always brushing up against the demands of civilized living. To manage this conflict, we rely on outlets like art, literature, film, and television — forms that allow us to sublimate (to unconsciously and symbolically indulge) our primitive urges without destabilizing society or our own psychological well-being.
Reality TV — because it features 'real people' in dramatized settings — gives us permission to flirt with our more primitive impulses: envy, competition, cruelty. It lets us vicariously indulge in dysfunction and chaos from the safety of our couches, without breaking social rules or causing lasting harm.
And then Donald Trump, a former reality TV personality himself, made every day a real-life spectacle.
Trump entered both terms of his presidency by shattering the protective barrier of the screen and displaying all the hallmarks of reality TV's genre's most notorious villains: narcissism, manipulation, performative cruelty, engineered tribalism, and unchecked grievance. What was once safely held in the collective unconscious and expressed through art now plays out in the real world — unfiltered, uncontained, and unrelenting.
The primal chaos we once safely indulged in during 43 minutes of petty drama and escapism now spills into our news feeds, our laws, and our wallets. There's no off switch. The conflicts on 'The Real Housewives' and the scheming on 'Survivor' now feel like the ones between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd: cartoonish, low-stakes, and recycled. They're dull compared with our real 'reality.'
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In lieu of reality TV, I've turned to British mystery series, like 'Midsomer Murders,' where the world may be grim, but order is restored and justice usually prevails. With each episode, the bad guys are caught and the community heals. It's the kind of resolution I no longer trust reality TV, or our real lives, to deliver.
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