Sunday, November 18, 2012

REALITY TV

Some long time friends of my parents have been doing a Reality TV show for a production company, trying to find a network or cable channel to pick it up. It's a retail sort of show, dealing with their business, and one of the ladies is my former piano teacher and has been friends with our family for forty years now.

If it does ever make it on cable, I'll watch it to just to watch our friends, not so much for the topic of the show. They're not the Kardashians, or the Gosslin's or any of the other highly dysfunctional types that abound in reality TV. So it won't be lively in the way that some of these other shows are.

I'm not much into reality TV, although lately I have been watching the Yukon and Alaska shows involving homesteaders and their hunting, fishing and other exploits living somewhat off the grid. I enjoy the sporting aspects of those shows, and the wildlife and sporting opportunities in the areas these folks live.

I've also been watching some of the gold prospecting shows, including one where they are in Ghana or somewhere I'd not want to be worried about some random armed Chinese miners squatting on a claim they can't work.

With most of these reality shows, you see it once or twice and you've pretty much seen what's going to repeat season after season. Ice Road Truckers pretty much took one viewing to see that it's not something I'd do out of choice, and it is highly dangerous.

Same thing with Arctic Circle fishing and crabbing. Highly dangerous. Far more dangerous that Ice Road Trucking, me thinks. I'd take the trucking over being on a teeny, tiny boat (compared to the size of the sea and ocean) in sub-freezing whether with all kinds of accidents waiting to happen.

But all it took was watching a couple of two or three shows and I got the drift of working on a professional fishing vessel in Arctic waters. I understand the motivation of these folks, the truckers and fisherman and the like. They'll be doing this job anyway, so why not be on TV for it. I'm sure they get some bucks for doing it, and mostly they are not cast in a negative light.


But other shows that seem to have no point, like the Kardashian franchises, seem to have no point at all.  So many people want their 15 minutes of fame, even if that fame is highly derogatory and negative. They want to see themselves on TV. It's as if to validate their existence, they are willing to shame themselves, intentionally at times, in front of millions of viewers, in order to be on TV for some very short period of time and then fade away forgotten save for a footnote in a wiki entry somewhere.

I'm sure Tampa Bay socialite Jill Kelley and her twin sister will have a reality show soon. And it will no doubt be tortuous. And tedious. And short lived.

1 comment:

  1. We are too poor around here to pay for Reality TV so I just sit around and watch the neighbors while they all sit around and watch me.

    The only time I slept with the neighbor's wife was when we both snoozed off while chatting on the front porch.

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