God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy by Mike Huckabee

Author:Mike Huckabee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466866713
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

11

Reality-TV Culture

THERE’S NO QUESTION THAT our society at large has been affected by the rise of “reality TV,” both in the impressions it gives the world of what working-class Americans are like, and the influence it’s had on the attitudes and behavior of American youth.

For many Bubble-ville elites, the only mental images they have of people who live outside their gated communities and high-rise Manhattan apartments are the ugly stereotypes they see on reality-TV shows: drunken, brawling New Jersey guidos; shallow, social-climbing suburban “housewives”; obese, illiterate Southern rednecks; and so on. I much preferred it when city slickers got their ideas of what we Southerners were like from The Andy Griffith Show. Or even The Beverly Hillbillies. At least the Clampetts were a hardworking, down-to-earth, God-fearing, loving family, with far more common sense and morals than their greedy, conniving banker, Mr. Drysdale. If you compared the typical Southern family of today to many of the Wall Street bankers of today, that old sitcom might seem like prophecy.

But wait, you protest, I can’t possibly be saying that The Beverly Hillbillies was more realistic than reality TV! Yes, I am. And so were Mork and Mindy, Bewitched, and My Mother the Car.

Not since Obamacare was dubbed the “Affordable Care Act” has anything been so wildly misnamed as “reality TV.” One thing that Michael Moore should have taught us by now is that just because something looks like a documentary and sounds like a documentary, that doesn’t mean there’s a lick of truth in it.

Reality TV is a genre of television that allegedly dispenses with the artifices of scripts and acting to give the viewer a glimpse of raw, real life unfolding spontaneously in front of the camera. In fact, it bears about as much resemblance to real life as the glop on your movie popcorn does to real butter. Reality TV doesn’t do away with scripts, it just does away with good scripts. Good scriptwriters strive to create original, engrossing stories and complex, multilayered characters. Most reality-TV shows are just as scripted, except at a level of sophistication a notch below cave paintings or Three Stooges movies.

People who are desperate to get on TV will gladly follow crude scenarios for staged conflict and outrageous behavior that are assembled later in the editing room to create whatever impression the producers want to convey. Top writers of drama or comedy expect to be paid commensurate with their talent, but why pay their price when the lowest common denominator yields similar ratings at lower cost? That’s why so many of the best writers, like The Sopranos creator David Chase and Matthew Weiner of Mad Men, are on cable channels that are willing to pay for quality to enhance their reputations. And it’s working: in 2013, HBO garnered 108 Emmy Award nominations. The “Big Four” broadcast network ABC had 45.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of reality TV ran parallel to the erosion in viewership and falling ad revenues of traditional television. If a struggling network

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