There you are, sitting on the couch, flipping through the channels. None of your shows are on (I mean, we’ve all got our shows, right? I don’t have television and even I have my shows), but you’re stuck now. It’s too late to start on a book or project and too early to go to bed, and the couch has created the perfect ass-sized indent for your maximum lounging comfort (that shit takes an hour, at least). After about fifteen to eighty minutes of channel-surfing you begin to feel like you might settle for anything, and you land on Fox, your lord and emperor when it comes to settling for mediocre programming.

Reality television is subversive, even when it’s horrible. In fact, the worse it is, the more you might be drawn into it. There’s just something about watching people in situations that really have no redeeming qualities that makes a person want to hunker down and eat some popcorn. Suddenly, watching someone forced to eat a cave spider, your life doesn’t seem so bad.

So tonight Fox is airing a new reality show, called Unan1mous. Basically, they lock nine people in a bunker and throw $1.5 million up as a prize. The catch is that the nine people have to unanimously decide on who wins the money. And the longer they take, the less money is up for grabs. It sounds kind of interesting, but in the end it’s one of those damn shows where people are trying to influence each other, make friends with the right people without making enemies of other people, and convince everyone that they deserve to win that money.

Question: Does anyone deserve to win $1.5 million for being on a telelvision show?

I don’t think so. Despite the fact that the idea is new and interesting, in the end the show will be the same as many other shows. People trying to influence people into liking them without being too transparent about it. Some reality shows are worthwhile to me for certain reasons. I like The Apprentice because those people need some skills to survive in the show. Some of them get by for awhile on how well they can influence (read: manipulate) people, but in the end it’s the people with the ideas who know how to get things done that do well. I can appreciate that. American Idol is similar. Part of it is about likability, but perhaps more than any other show, it’s about talent. I like watching real people with skills, be it singing, dancing, or advertising. Eating cave spiders and making people like you? Not so much.

But it’s funny, because no matter how bad these shows are, a lot of people get sucked into them. It’s happened to me, much to my chagrin. We’re fascinated that we can put our faces up to the glass and watch as we turn people into animals competing for the biggest piece of meat. It’s a social experiment that we’re all a part of, and as much as we’d like to think, “Oh yes, those people in that bunker and how they act …” the experiment has as much to do with us as it does with them, because we choose to watch it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.