Reality television personality David Hester has sued Storage
Wars for wrongful termination alleging that the A&E
program rigs auctions and plants curios in lockers. Will they next
tell us that Santa Claus isn’t real?
It’s a sign of the times that a genre so obviously staged,
coached, and scripted calls itself “reality” television. Think
“Orange Drink.” In the words of that great green-toothed
philosopher Johnny Rotten, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been
cheated?”
Reality television producers eventually discovered what their
colleagues behind primetime dramas already knew: most everyday
strangers aren’t so terribly interesting as to merit their own
shows. But they come cheaper than actors. So producers transform
real people into fictional characters while retaining the illusion
of reality.
Storage Wars is as real as Star Wars. But it’s
hardly the lone deceiver.
TLC’s Breaking Amish depicts the adventures of five
Anabaptist yahoos in the big city. But as the past divorces,
tattoos, DUIs, and domestic violence arrests of cast members
revealed, the stars of the show lost their innocence long before
losing their anonymity on the idiot box.
A former participant on the HGTV program House Hunters
spilled the beans earlier this year that she had already purchased
a home when the program depicted her inspecting several houses,
including the one she already owned, before settling on a property.
She claimed, and the show’s producers never denied, that they
wouldn’t even cast her until she had closed on a house.
“The Hills was pretty fake,” Kristin Cavallari admitted
earlier this month on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live.
Quarterback Jay Cutler’s baby momma described the MTV hit as full
of “fake relationships” and “fake fights.” At least the
faux-reality show fessed up to its fakeness by memorably ending the
series by panning back to reveal a set, cleverly saying goodbye
with a lingering shot of the “Hollywood” sign.
Americans are too jaded to be scandalized. More than a half
century after payola and the quiz-show scandals, we’ve become
habituated to being lied to. Judging by the ratings of Storage
Wars, we even like it.
Our forebears liked Twenty One, too — until they
discovered it a fraud. Congress investigated and uncovered
malfeasance. Columbia University and NBC’s Today Show
fired Charles Van Doren, the beneficiary of the rigging. Producer
Dan Enright, Twenty One’s chief fixer, and its host Jack
Berry endured exile from their profession for many years before
staging comebacks. The affair scandalized viewers who had idealized
Van Doren as the type of cultured, refined gentleman they had
aspired to breed, be, or be with.
The rigged fifties quiz shows prefaced today’s reality
television. “The contestants became the forerunners of Andy
Warhol’s idea of instant fame,” David Halberstam explained in
The Fifties. The late author continued, “After only a few
appearances on the show, audiences began to regard the contestants
as old and familiar friends. Perhaps, in retrospect, the most
important thing illuminated by the show was how easily television
conferred fame and established an image. Virtual strangers could
become familiar to millions of their fellow citizens.”
Faker than the reality shows are the lives of the people
addicted to them. Through their pixilated companions, the
couch-bound make new friends, partake in romances, and experience
drama. We are never as boring as when we find televised strangers’
lives more exciting than our own.
If we lived in a more ethical time and place, the revelations of
cable-TV cons would invite cancellations and perhaps the
metamorphosis of conmen into convicts. But we keep watching so they
keep lying. Discovery’s Amish Mafia, which premiered
Wednesday, is the latest program to elicit widespread skepticism.
The show drew 3.4. million viewers, with the male demographic
setting several records for the cable channel.
If only reality television had the decency of professional
wrestling by admitting what the audience already knows, then decent
people could view Omarosa, JWoww, and Honey Boo Boo as they do the
Undertaker. Alas, producers don’t aim for the decent demographic,
which isn’t as large as it was when Twenty One first
appeared.
The Ivy League English instructor who was that program’s hero,
and eventual villain, Charles Van Doren, would certainly have
recognized that “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in
ourselves.”
