I have a daughter who watches Reality TV. I don't like the shows. I am a hard sell for almost anything on television. Yes, I am a fan of Masterpiece Theater and once upon a time thought CNN was interesting. What happened there? Now it is fodder for late night comedy. 24 hour coverage of a missing plane with experts thinking it might have gone to heaven. Very thought provoking.
I have several totally cliche favorite watching moments. The most significant were shared by zillions. Seeing Elvis and then the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Iconic. Then I have the very special moments. There were some days when I sat on the big chair in the sun room with my mother and we watched Shirley Temple movies together and cried and laughed. There was the day when I was watching the Guiding Light with our cleaning lady and drinking gin at noon. A character named Julie died in a drunk driving accident and we were so shocked. She was a favorite of ours. We had been at this activity for some time by then and I kind of freaked out at Julie's death. I had a bit of an epiphany in that moment. I decided to go back to college. I did.
The first time I ever saw a Soap Opera was two years after we got our first television. I was born during the war but by the time I hit third grade, the baby boomer epidemic hit. We were in prefab classrooms on double shifts. I went to school morning shift. My mother wasn't working. When I came home for lunch and the rest of the afternoon, we started watching the Soaps. This was the bad year when my very active mother had a depression. Her parents had died and she had a miscarriage. When I look back, I wonder whether only depressed, stuck at home people watched those shows.
Other people's misery is fully distracting. Those were the glory days of Soaps. The shows were live and the rehearsals were mostly for staging. (who walks in the door and when she walks in) The actors were so familiar with their characters that they 'became' them on the shows. There were some funny moments when they flubbed their lines or fell asleep on the operating table. When spring came, Mom got a grip and turned off the TV. In spite of the gap of many years, I was able to pick up the stories when I took up the shows again. I guess I was having my own dark night of the soul.
There is something about going into other people's lives for an hour or a half hour 5 days a week. That is one thing that keeps me from connecting to reality shows. Firstly, I think most of the contests are idiotic an boring. Secondly, the shows repeat and repeat and show scenes over and over from previous shows and then there is that thing about the voices. I can hear the tension and fakeness in a Housewives or a Kardashian voice two rooms away. Thirdly I am a bit of a snob.
I have to laugh at myself when I look at this picture. I can be a snob preferring Soaps over Reality. Who am I? I do admit that two of the smartest men I knew from college ended up being writers. One wrote for All My Children and another for the Guiding Light. These slips we treated with humor. It wasn't much different from the doctor who was going to save the world ending up doing nose jobs or the lawyer who was going to help the poor working for Halliburton. Shit happens and there can only be so many great American novels after all.
It was, after all the writers strike that jump started the Reality show industry. What goes around comes around.
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