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The best reality shows can be much more engrossing, complex and diverse than your average TV cop show. Last year The Amazing Race included the team of bisexual screenwriter Mike White and his gay minister father Mel White, giving a more nuanced, less stereotypical portrayal of both sexual orientation and faith than most big-network dramas would.
The past decade has seen experiments like documentary maker Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days for FX, a brilliant trading-places switcheroo. (For instance, an anti-immigration militant spent a month living the life of an illegal alien.) Wife Swap is an intriguing show about American subcultures (homeschoolers, political activists, etc.) and the natural tendency of parents to secretly judge one another. TLC's 19 Kids and Counting, about the fecund Duggars, may be an extreme-parenting freak show, but it's also a series about the life of a deeply religious family, a rare subject for TV dramas today.
Even MTV, home of Jersey Shore, has the high-minded 16 and Pregnant (which often features working-class families, who scarcely exist in network drama nowadays); The Buried Life, about four friends who travel the world helping people accomplish things they want to do before they die; and My Life as Liz, a sort of reality My So-Called Life about a high school outcast in small-town Texas.
Are any of these MTV shows as big or as widely hyped as Jersey Shore (which got nearly 5 million viewers for its season finale)? No. But that is on you and me, not on reality TV. And even in the cheesiest reality shows, there is an aspirational quality, a democratic quality, a quality that's — yeah, I'll say it — American. "American" in the sense that what is true of countries is true of TV genres: their worst traits are inseparable from their best ones.
In the basic criticism of reality TV — that it makes people famous for nothing rather than rewarding hard work — is a Puritan streak that is as old as Plymouth Rock: Seek thou not the Folly of Celebrity, but apply thyself with Humility to thy Industry! Well, that's one strain of American values. But there are other American ideas that reality TV taps into: That everybody should have a shot. That sometimes being real is better than being polite. That no matter where you started out, you can hit it big, get lucky and reinvent yourself. In her own way, Jwoww is as American a character as the nobody Jay Gatsby heading east and changing his name.
And most important, that you can find something interesting in the lives of people other than celebrities, lawyers and doctors. In CBS's new Undercover Boss, executives go incognito to work in entry-level jobs in their companies. In the premiere, Larry O'Donnell, president and COO of Waste Management, picks up litter and cleans toilets. He learns that a woman driving a garbage route has to pee in a coffee can to keep on schedule; trash sorters are docked two minutes' pay for every minute they're late from their half-hour lunch. He's horrified; he's humbled; he vows to help his workers out.
There's plenty to criticize in Undercover Boss. The show is moving but it's also manipulative and infuriating. Yes, O'Donnell hands out raises and rewards to the nice people we've met. It makes him (and us) feel good. But company-wide — economy-wide — there's no reason to believe things will get better for the overstressed workers who didn't get on TV.
But here's the thing: you, watching the show, have the tools to come to that conclusion. You've held a job. You know how companies work. And one thing reality TV has trained people to do is to be savvy about its editing. That's how people watch reality TV: you can doubt it, interrogate it, talk back to it, believe it, or not.
And either way, what you're left with is a prime-time TV show about topical concerns, at a time when people would like to see some humility in our CEOs; a show, like Discovery's Dirty Jobs, about toilet cleaners and garbage pickers and other people that "quality TV" rarely takes notice of; a show, at heart, about how absolutely crazy-hard ordinary people work.
You also — in the worn-out but cheerful employees — see a testimony to the incredible camera-readiness of the American public. How did O'Donnell manage to work unsuspected among his employees? He told them he was "Randy," a host making a reality show, natch, about entry-level jobs.
And what could be more natural than that? What could be more normal, in an age of ubiquitous media, than to take a stranger for a ride on your garbage truck and complain about your supervisors to the cameras? TV calls, and you must answer. It is as if, as a society, we had been singing in front of a mirror for generations, only to discover that now the mirror can actually see us. And if we are really lucky, it might just offer us a show.