David Anna - Reality matters: 19 writers come clean about the shows we cant stop watching

James Frey

YOU CANNOT ESCAPE IT. You will never escape it. Try as you may, you will never get away. Hope as you might, it will never go away. Its on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five motherfucking days a year. Its drunk screaming wives flipping tables. Its brave men on creaky boats complaining about the weather and praying for fish. Its policemen making arrest after arrest after arrest after arrest. Its idiotic and banal and makes you hate yourself for watching it. Teenagers spinning out over a first kiss. Parents with too many children who hate each other. Its mindless, mind-numbing, and it kills your brain. Hipsters in their early twenties pretending to live normal lives, men auditioning wives whom they will never marry. Its a complete, utter, and absolute waste of time. Contestants on an island, in the jungle, in the wilds of China, in the depths of Africa, whoever wins gets a million dollars! It makes you feel like a fool. Cougars, MILFs, wife swapping, speed dating!!! Its on from dawn to dusk, and into the depths of the night. You cant get enough of it, and you cant live without it. Its reality television. You will never fucking escape it.

I love reality television. I watch some form of it almost every day. Today, this minute, as this file sits open before me, my computer on my lap, my feet up on a table, my ass on a couch (where it often is and feels very comfortable), a remote next to me, there are, according to the digital channel guide provided by my digital cable provider (Time Warner Cable of New York City), eighty-eight reality shows available to me. I define a reality show as something constructed to resemble reality, where a camera crew follows people around while they do something. That something can be, and at this point has been just about anything, though the producers (move the fuck over, Einstein) keep coming up with new things ( Board Breaker about a Norwegian kung fu master, also a widower and a single father to two adorable blond girls, who has devoted his life to breaking boards with his hands, feet, head, and every other part of his body and is trying to set a board breaking world record). The best of the shows are entertaining, informative, moving, and heartbreaking, and inspire us to become better people ( The Biggest Loser ). The worst of them, which are often the most fun to watch, are evil, cynical, nasty, mean, and ugly, and inspire long, hard laughter ( The Biggest Loser Reunion: One Year Later ). The shows, more of which appear on my digital channel guide every day, have all but taken over television. Theyre cheap to make (all you need is a crew, the subjects, and a team of editors to manipulate the footage), and there is an endless supply of people willing to be in them. They can be targeted to highly specific demographics (single female seniors living in rest homes in the Midwest) so that highly specific products can be placed in them or advertised on them while theyre broadcast (adult diapers and romance novels). They cross cultures, cross racial and ethnic lines, cross religious barriers. They appeal to members of every socio economic class and social strata. They are watched by viewers of every age and every generation. And theyre a dream for network programmers. They eat up hours, attract viewers and advertisers, and theres little at stake if one of them fails. For someone like me, we are living in a golden age.

My first memories of watching a reality show are the hours I spent with The Real World: New York . First broadcast on MTV, in 1992, it was, at the time, a revolutionary idea: stick some people in their early twenties in a big place to live and follow them around while they go about their lives. It was also a remarkably simple idea, the kind of idea that made you angry that you didnt think of it yourself. Initially, when I first saw the ads and promos for it, I wondered why I would want to watch it. I had enough bullshit in my lifegirl problems, too many drugs and too much drinking, no job and no desire to have a job. Why would I care about some one elses? Once it started, though, people began talking about itabout the drama of it, about their favorite cast members, about what they thought would happen next. It sounded remarkably like a normal TV show, except that the people were real, and lived in the real world. I got high one afternoon and tuned in. I dont remember where in the season they were, or what happened on the episode, and it doesnt matter. I saw people doing shit that I could identify with, except that it seemed cooler, more exciting, more dramatic, more difficult, more rewarding, more perilous, more of everything, and, most important, more real. I was fucking hooked.

I watched that season, and the next, in Los Angeles, and the next, in San Francisco, and Ive watched every season since. For a long time I didnt know why I liked it or what made it more real to me or why I continued watching, along with millions of other people. And then the real world descended on methe real real worldand I had to make money and support myself and figure out what the fuck I was going to do, and I started writing. At first I wrote bullshit in journals about my daily comings and goings, then I wrote films, then I started writing books, or trying to write books, based on my own life. As it did on The Real World , and on every other reality show, shit happened, some of it good and some it bad, some of it exciting and some of it boring. I had highs and lows; I had heartbreaks and triumphs; I loved and I lost. When I started writing about it, I realized it wasnt enough to just document it or to portray it in some objective way; it needed to be manipulated, altered, heightened and diminished, it needed to be edited for effect, and for pace, and for structure. That to tell a story, and tell it well, one needed a beginning, a middle, and an end. That to tell to a story, and tell it well, life, reality, day-to-day events, could be a basis, but that additions would need to be made to make the story live and breathe and function, to make it seem like life, to make it seem real. I learned the great secret of reality television, and of writing, and of every other form of narrative self-documentation and narrative storytelling: that its all fake, every second of it, every minute of it, every page of it, every episode of it. Its all fucking fake. Manipulated and embellished and edited. Fake so that it can be real. Structured and polished. Fake so that we can consume it and connect to it and identify with it and enjoy it. Made to entertain. We call it the real world, but its not. Its all fucking fake.

And to me, at least, it doesnt matter. I dont care. Actually quite the opposite. I revel in realitys fakeness. I celebrate it. Support it. Preach its gospel. I drink it, eat it, let it flow through me. I let it move me and make me laugh. I let it piss me off and make me sad. I let it take me to places I would never go or see or know anything about. I let it entertain me, and educate me, and sometimesand this is always sort of shocking and sort of lovely and wonderfulit enlightens me. I let it occupy hours and days and weeks of my life. Fake reality. The unreal real world. Some reasonable semblance of the world reengineered to be more reasonable. Abnormal normalcy. Its the future, this state, this dimension, this way of disseminating. Its where our world, with virtual reality, with twenty-four news stations broadcasting different versions of the same events depending on their political philosophy, with memoirs full of truth but lacking fact, with newspapers more fictional than novels, with movies based on Hollywoods version of real life, with presidents and leaders of nations, both past and present, making shit up so they can go to war and pass laws and shape the world to their own vision, its where our world is going, or has already gone, or is right now. And I love it. Fucking revel in it. Celebrate it. It allows me, or you, or anyone else on this planet, to believe what we want to believe. To find what speaks to us. To create our own reality. To live in that reality. To be entertained in that reality. And to make that reality real. As real as anything else, and as true as anything else, and as valid as anything else. You cannot escape it. I said it before and I will say it again: You cannot fucking escape it. So sit back and make yourself comfortable and have a sip from a nice cold beverage and maybe a snack or two. Its your choice. Its your life. Its your reality. Its your story to tell or watch or read or write, to love or hate, to manipulate, embellish, edit or structure in any way you want. Its your show and your channel. Its on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five motherfucking days a year. You cannot escape it.