The New Rules of Reality TV
I am a fan of scripted television and here is why:
TV characters, reading from scripts, have much funnier lines than real people, stuck on an island or in a house, who don’t have scripts. And even if the real people do have scripts (I’m looking at you, “The Hills”), professional actors tend to do a better job delivering those lines.
But let’s forget how boring most reality TV is for a moment and remember instead how oppressively annoying the people on reality TV are.
I meet real people all the time and most of them are nice to be around. They’re funny or they’re serious or smart or dumb or lots of other things, but mostly, they are real. They have no big audience to lie to.
There are no real people on reality TV. They are all playing a character based on themselves (or even a character based on another character they saw once) and most of them do a poor job at it.
But that’s fine. If people still want to watch that crap and people still want to be on that crap, then let that crap go on existing, so long as I don’t have to watch it.
What I will not abide, however, is when reality TV contestants try and exist in the real world. They can be annoying on their own shows — but they need to stay away from appearing on shows that I want to watch.
Which is why I’ve come up with a couple of new rules for reality TV. I hope you will help me enforce these rules with hefty fines and heftier baseball bats.
1. As soon as you become “famous,” you can’t be on TV anymore. Jon and Kate Gosselin, the Kardashians, anybody who was on “Survivor,” you can stay on your own show, but the second you start appearing in tabloids or on “Entertainment Tonight,” your show is canceled and so is your fame. Sorry.
2. No more murderers. I’m kind of surprised this has to be a rule, but apparently nobody thought to do this before, so we’ve had a bunch of thugs and criminals on TV. You’re out.
3. If you’re a former star and have become a “reality star,” then your show at least has to be about why you were famous in the first place. Flavor Flav wants to put out a new album? Fine. Flavor Flav wants to get his G.E.D.? No way. Ideally, you’d do both of those things privately, Flav, but if you insist on being filmed, you better be making a record.
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i agree! reality tv is lame. i stick with documentaries. the only “reality tv show i have enjoyed was gary busey’s.