A State of Mind: Reality Tv

A State Of Mind: Reality TV

Is Reality TV good for us? This may be a question a person might ask themselves if they were one of the millions people who checked in with Joe Millionaire in the fall of 2003 on Fox. “Why Reality TV Is Good For Us”, this article was written by James Poniewozik in TIME magazine in 2003. Poniewozik goes to talk about how reality TV is good for all of us, “that viewers can empathize with Tony Soprano without wanting to be him” (Poniewozik 471). Wrong, most people look at TV and dream someday of becoming these fictional characters that we perceive as good and bad. TV viewers are being lead astray, “When a Reality TV show depicts bad behavior, it’s immoral, misanthropic, sexiest, or sick” by attracting viewers to a point were their interested in how far TV will go.

In experience as a viewer of reality TV shows I have noticed some disturbing things. For example: American Idol showed a rather over weight woman bend over and smack her hind side while she sang terribly. These are the types of bad behavior that we depict and say it’s ok to be like. Any knowledgeable person would look at this scenario and see that there is something wrong with the content we portray to society. That is, how people should act and should propagate. Yet Poniewozik says, “Embarrassment, these shows demonstrate, is survivable, even ignorable, and ignoring embarrassment is a skill we all could use”(Poniewozik 471). Poniewozik believes everybody across the world could use public humiliation to teach us a lesson. However, this so called skill of ignoring embarrassment is what makes us stay tuned into the networks, people are laughing at them not with them.

When reality TV first got its start there was a show that I viewed which I thought was a beginning to end. Reality TV shows even depict immoral acts as a joke to bring entertainment, like Joe Millionaire. They bring an average construction worker out of society make him a fake millionaire and see how many women will line up to marry him. Then reveal Joe’s secret at the end of the show to his future wife. This is what captivates audiences: we should marry for money and fame, not for love. However, the divorce rate has risen 700% in the last century. Poniewozik states that,” No reality show can match the intelligence and layers of well- constructed fiction”(Poniewozik 470), yet Hollywood has managed to do just that, bring fiction to life through reality TV shows. Producers have brought out these immoral acts of sex and violence on shows like Real World and Road Rules, which millions of youth watch everyday on TV and expect the youth to not look up to them. Are youth today is captivated by hours and hours of these shows depicting sexual connotations and immoral acts, and we still question the columbine incidents.

. Misanthropic is characterized by hatred or doubtful ridicule for human kind; this is a word that Poniewozik uses to describe Reality TV. This is an “American story of ambition and desperation and shrinking options, and it left the judgment to use. That’s unsettling. That’s heartbreaking. And the reality is, that’s good TV”. One could only ask if this