The Fiction of Reality TV

Reality is one of those things that philosophers spend a great deal of time thinking about. We’ve got an entire branch of the discipline devoted to the question of the principles of reality: Metaphysics. So, when confronted with something calling itself Reality TV, I find myself raising an eyebrow. In the first place, after two thousand plus years of work, philosophers have yet to find a way to demonstrate, definitively, the existence of a material world (which is what most people consider to be reality). Every attempt to prove or assert the absolute existence of a material world has met with failure. So, on that score, I find myself discounting the notion of reality in connection with Reality TV. However, let us make the assumption that such a material existence is the fact of the matter.
With the world as a given, there’s a deeper problem with the concept of Reality TV. Television, is by nature, an artificial construct. It breaks down images, which themselves exist only on film, or as digital data, and transmits them through the atmosphere, or bounces them off of satellites, and then another device takes those bits and pieces and reassembles them onto a screen. So, what you see is, at best, a second or third hand rendering of a recording of something that may or may not exist in the material world. There’s nothing very real about a picture of a picture that’s been disassembled and reassembled a couple of times.
Let’s set that aside for the moment and just talk about the experience of being in the world itself. The physical experience in the world is, not including sleep and barring some physiological disorder, a continuous one with long and boring stretches where nothing interesting happens. People go to work, do their jobs, pick up their dry-cleaning and so on. Life is a linear experience, morning to night, day to day, always connected. This is not the experience of Reality TV. It is sequential, as such, but it is not a continuous presentation of anything. It is presented piecemeal, like a work of fiction. A director, or an editor, or someone else has chosen to present you with fixed points in the lives of those who have been recorded.
Beyond that, a question that recurs in philosophy of film and philosophy of aesthetics is the question of how authentic something is that has been framed and recorded by a device. When you see a photograph, or watch a film, decisions have been made, by one or more other people. Someone has decided what speed film to employ. Someone has decided how to frame the shot, thereby deciding for you what constitutes the most important space of recorded environment. Someone has decided how to focus the shot. A vast set of factors that make up the recorded space has been reduced with no choices on your part. This is not the case in the world of non-Reality TV. You get to make those choices any other time.
Perhaps the thing that most condemns Reality TV as being without any reality at all is the subjects of the shows themselves. As amusing, or interesting, or pathetic one may find the Hogan’s, the Osborne’s, the cast of Survivor, or the enigmatic Gene Simmons, these people are anomalous. Be it due to their careers (Hogan, Simmons), or their environments (Survivor), they exist in what one might call extraordinary circumstances. They are what are referred to in statistics as outliers. Outliers are invariably interesting, but they are fundamentally non-representative. The reality that most people inhabit does not include multi-million dollar homes, record contracts, or living on an island competing for a huge payoff by being the most effective con. The reality of the vast majority of people is marked by the far more mundane repetition of a job or jobs, their kids’ activities, dishes, taking out the garbage, and doing the laundry. That is the reality that rarely, if ever, appears on so-called Reality TV. The sad fact of the matter is this: reality, as strange as it sometimes is, by and large is populated by people who live routine lives.
Those self-same, average people don’t watch Reality TV to see reality. They watch it for the same reason that they watch movies and other fiction based visual media; because it isn’t reality. It’s entertainment. It’s escape from reality. It’s far too edited, too distilled, and probably far too choreographed to be considered reality. So let’s just stop calling it Reality TV and start calling it what it really is: Fiction.