Reality swap

In my real life I don’t watch a lot of TV. I don’t have moral objections to television, I just don’t have time. I also don’t have much opportunity or interest. Trying to find a slot between our two gaming systems, Cartoon Network, Project Runway, and endless loops of Law and Order can be challenging. This competition is compounded by the appalling lack of magical religious romantic sci-fi programming available on any given night. So if I am around and the household decides to indulge my tastes in entertainment, we resort to DVDs.

When I travel, though, all deterrents and discernment stay home and I will watch anything on a hotel TV. Lots and lots of anything, for hours and hours on end.

It is like un-kinking a hose in front of a thirsty person: images spew and I sit riveted, the remote pointed at the screen like a beacon in cave, illuminating every possible nook and cranny of nonsense to be discovered. I will surf, I will pause, I will go back and forth watching two or three programs at a time. No matter the time of day or tightness of schedule, I drop my suitcase and open the armoire doors immediately.

You learn things when you immerse yourself in television, obvious things but always surprising. I had no idea how much America adores Sandra Bullock and Forrest Gump. We love “true” crime stories “ripped from the headlines.” We love contests. We love sports. We only want to hear about current events if they are distilled through a “personality” of some sort. We like to laugh but only at the same three sitcoms. We think all doctors should be sexy and having sex with one another between patients. The tattoo parlor, Inked, has trouble keeping a good receptionist and if you stay up late enough you can watch soft porn “documentaries” on HBO.

This week while traveling, I watched two shows (amid thousands) that I thought were particularly educational—Extreme Home Makeover and Wife Swap.

In Extreme Home Makeover, “normal” people nominate candidates who are so sad and downtrodden that they might benefit from having a new house. The show selects from the nomination pool and then sends out their team of cute experts to rebuild, refurbish, and/or redecorate the chosen person’s home. This week they picked a family with a mom and five children who had recently lost their forty-something father to a heart attack. The dad had been a pastor and the good Christian family was tossed out of the parsonage when the church hired a replacement. Grieving and unemployed, the family was now living in a run-down trailer. The producers built them a 5,000-square-foot house, then transformed the old trailer and presented it to an even more desperate family living in even more squalor. The whole town got involved, helping in some capacity. The recipients cried. I cried. It was a very emotional show.

It was also a typical “reality show” designed to achieve a specific thesis statement rather than true reality. I could almost most hear the brainstorming conversation around the pre-production table: “OK guys, we need a show about ‘faith’ and ‘community’ and ‘family love.’ We need goodness, we need nobility, we need a family that viewers will admire and feel sorry for. Look through the postcards and get me a religious widow, damn it—the more kids the better.” The purpose of the show (other than brand placement which is shameless) was to communicate sameness—underneath all our various denominations, politics and hip haircuts, we are all just Americans who value family and help our community. I knew I was being manipulated, every scene edited for a particular response, but I allowed my heart full reign, and it felt good to believe that people could reach out to each other so profoundly. It felt good to see a flamboyant man with eyeliner and a skin tight black t-shirt lecture a group of Oklahoma construction workers on higher powers. See, there is hope; in the end, we can get along. I cried some more.

Wife Swap is based on a different premise. Two women switch places and live each other’s life for two weeks. One of the participants this episode was from Arizona—a PETA activist vegan who stripped her house of all excess objects, gained energy from the sun and whose only activity appeared to be yoga. The other woman was a feisty Kentuckian who frenetically tended to a cluttered house full of animals: stuffed heads on the wall, hunted flesh in the freezer, livestock in the yard. She was as “just folks” as the other woman was “out there.” Mix them up and hilarity ensues.

Of course your definition of hilarity needs to include voyeuristic gawking at human discomfort. This show is anything but a celebration of diversity. It is designed to stir the pot, mock the marginal, and ultimately suggest that in spite of a few shallow insights, everyone not like us is a freak. There is also a lot of crying in this show, but by the cast only: the viewer is encouraged to smirk.

Why focus on these trashy programs when I could be writing about adventures in a tattoo parlor (on a series which, incidentally, is quite good)? What struck me is that both of these shows are edited for the same effect. You can organize most fluff TV under this pleading heading: Please Mister Man, make me feel better about my world, my life, my taste in home décor. Just tell me that I am smarter or more fortunate than most people. Let me be the judge. if you give me a chance, I will even pay to call on my cell phone.

I am a case study. Alone in a hotel room, cranky to be away from my family and my stuff, I search longingly for a Mandy Moore film. In lieu of A Walk to Remember, a reality show will make me feel connected and superior. Either reaction eases the loneliness. Either compels me to look at channel after channel of car wrecks.

The most “real” moment of the Extreme Home Makeover concerned the family’s thirteen-year-old boy. (Keep in mind, this kid is a micro-town preacher’s kid in B.F.E. Oklahoma and for some reason the designer decided to decorate his room in a scary urban-ghetto chic reminiscent of the set of Rent.). The boy walks in to his new bedroom and looks around with an expression of amused revulsion, definitely not undiluted gratitude. In his face we see what filtered TV prefers to temper—no matter how sentimental or sordid you arrange the clips, real life, in context and without editing, is complex and occasionally boring. We pray never to be forced to the edges of human experience. The extremes are what happen to other people, people who not anything like us.

4 responses to “Reality swap”

  1. MF says:

    This post made me laugh out loud! Not at the television programming you describe, but at the vision of another traveling professional glued to the tv in the hotel room. I turn the tv on when I’m traveling, too. Katie Couric and Matt Lauer? Yes. Raymond? Yes. Dr. House? Yes. American Idol? Yes. All of it.

    I’m guessing it’s like you say… No family or dog to compete for my time and a need for a little comfort.

    Great post.

  2. kevin sprinkle says:

    i spent almost 13 months in alabama last year only coming home like every other weekend. i rarely turned the TV on except for important sporting events (no..not texas hold em on ESPN 5) and my fav Myth Busters although i must say that ESPN SportsCenter at 5am is comforting when one is stumbling around the room…another good post

  3. p: i’ve seen the other version of the wife swap show. i can’t remember what it’s called. but it actually worked quite well the one episode i saw: the self-absorbed tribeca father of bratty tribeca teenagers went to some hellhole trailer house in the south with fat kids on the couch eating potato chips and playing nintendo all day. they taught him to slow down a little, to savor simple things, like steak on the rusty bbq or playing football with the kids. meanwhile, the redneck dad is trying to plan a bat mitzvah in manhattan. he tells the family they’ve all gone out of their minds, can’t believe how much money they’re spending on a party for a bratty teenager, and is put in charge of making a budget for the affair. he actually pulled it off. if i remember this right (i probably saw it in a hotel years ago; i can’t imagine when else i would have seen it) they all came to appreciate one another and everything worked out by the end — not only that, but both fathers returned to the homes of origin having a new appreciation for the families they had and a desire to change things at home to. it was downright schlocky.

    are you still in LA this week? have we missed you??

  4. Anonymous says:

    punk rock t shirt…