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But what message is it all sending? The viralization of people like American Idol's General Larry (Pants on the Ground) Platt and William Hung before him has led to the charge that reality TV invites us to laugh at little people for sport. The fame of Jersey Shore's tanning-bed casualties and others brings the critique that reality TV celebrates violence, sluttiness (male and female) and other bad behavior.
These charges are so contradictory as to cancel each other out. How, exactly, can reality TV mock its participants and celebrate them at the same time? In fact, the audience's relation to reality shows is more complicated. People don't watch Jersey Shore because they consider the Situation a role model. It's entertaining because the show is basically satire, a pumped-up spoof of bigger-is-better American culture. (Quoth Jwoww: "I see a bunch of, like, gorilla juice heads, tall, completely jacked, steroid, like multiple growth hormone — that's, like, the type I'm attracted to.")
One of the biggest proponents of the idea that reality TV appeals to the worst in us is ... reality TV. Case in point, Susan Boyle. When she showed up, unpolished and dowdy, and blew the doors off Britain's Got Talent in her singing audition, it was hailed as a sign that we were finally getting sick of the ugly, snarky culture of reality TV. Did you see her wipe the smirk off Simon Cowell's face? The judges were ready to laugh at her, but she showed them that looks aren't everything! Well, yes, except that Boyle's entire "subversion" of reality TV was set up, framed and milked by a reality show.
Reality shows showcase plenty of bad behavior, but they also presume a heavy moralism on the part of the audience. Survivor is known for its self-rationalizing, situational ethics. Anything you do to win can be justified as playing the game. But part of the reason fans become involved in the show is that they get invested in the good guys and bad guys.
Look at the title of Survivor's 10th-anniversary season, starting this month: "Heroes vs. Villains" — that is, those who played decently vs. those who "just played the game." Plenty of fans were entertained by Richard Hatch, who lied his way to the first-season title (often while buck naked). But a million dollars and one tax-evasion conviction later, do they admire him?
The main dangers of reality TV aren't to the viewers but to the participants and those around them. The Heenes were lucky the Balloon Boy hoax was just embarrassing and not deadly. But the sleaziest, and saddest, aspect of their whole story was the implication that their kids were being raised to think it was all a normal thing that people do to help the family business. As Falcon Heene blurted to his dad on Larry King Live, "You guys said that we did this for the show."
DJ Adam Goldstein, a.k.a. DJ AM, died last year of an overdose resulting from a drug relapse — while making a reality show about drug abuse for MTV that brought him close to his old temptations. NBC's The Biggest Loser casts ever heftier contestants and subjects them to ever-more-stressful challenges, to the point where it seems a competitive-eating reality show would be healthier. Sometimes it's the producers, not the viewers, who could use the reminder that it's not O.K. to do whatever it takes to win the (ratings) game.
Why Reality TV Is Us
But there's more to reality TV than fame-crazy lunatics, 'roid-raging meatheads and silicone drama queens wearing little more than craftily deployed censors' pixelation. A decade after Survivor, reality TV has become too vast and diverse a genre to be defined by any one set of especially lousy shows. And for all of everyone's worries 10 years ago, reality TV hasn't crowded "quality shows" off the air. The past 10 years of scripted shows — The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Mad Men — are the strongest TV has ever had. (One genre that reality may be crowding out is soap operas. As the World Turns is ending, as did Guiding Light, their appeal supplanted by the immersive serial dramas of Jon & Kate, among others.)
In the best cases, reality and scripted television have reached a kind of symbiosis. It's not just that reality shows have learned to structure themselves like sitcoms and dramas. Many of the best TV shows of the '00s lift heavily from reality TV or would have been impossible without it.
Lost, for instance, began as an attempt to create a drama version of Survivor. Several of TV's best comedies — the American and British versions of The Office, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development and Modern Family — have borrowed directly from reality TV's format of vérité filmmaking and "confessional" interviews with the characters.
Maybe the best example yet of the reality-fiction alliance is Fox's high school choir spoof Glee, which, in essence, is American Idol in teen-dramedy form. It is a literal re-creation of the pop appeal of Idol (just like Idol's, Glee's songs fly to the top of iTunes on a weekly basis). And it's also a critique of the American Idol culture that made it possible. In the words of Rachel (Lea Michele), "Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor."