Is it just me, or is television becoming really disturbing lately?
Last night I visited somebody else' home while they were eating dinner. The television set was on as they ate, and their show of choice was "Hoarders: Buried Alive", a TLC program. TLC was once "The Learning Channel" but now TLC obviously means The Lowest Crap. Why these people could eat while watching "Hoarders: Buried Alive" is beyond me. In the episode airing when I entered their living room, the sewage pipes inside the home of some middle-age couple had burst, and the filth had covered everything-- and I mean EVERYTHING. It looked like they had not thrown anything out in the decades they had lived there. They had to have professionals come and assist them in removing the toxic junk and in the process, the couple living there found the dessicated corpse of their pet cat... and all the while, dinner was going on in the living room.
The following episode of "Hoarders: Buried Alive" was not much better. An older man was living on his property that looked like it was built on a landfill. He obviously had a mental breakdown of sorts when his wife left him (and I didn't catch all of the background about his children, who showed up later, but I guess they had left him too), but to compensate for the heartbreak, he began compulsively piling up garbage throughout his house-- and by garbage, I mean GARBAGE! He left rotted/rotting food, like cartons of orange juice, milk jugs, food containers, etc. lying everywhere, and piled more junk on top of it. He ate food that was three to four weeks past its expiration date-- some of it was crawling with flies. The old man made claims that some of the junk (old electronics, vehicles, tires, gardening tools, etc.) could be used at a future date, but he didn't have the wherewithal to use it. So what would the excuse be for old containers of food that were piled up to the ceiling, I wondered?
Anyway, I am not here to talk about people who are compulsive hoarders, as pitiful as they may be. I more concerned about compulsive observers, people who seem to enjoy such programming on their television sets. For the life of me, I cannot understand why people would want to watch others living in misery. Perhaps it makes them feel better about their own life struggles, but I still cannot feel any sense of purpose in wasting time planted in front of the 'boob tube' letting such negativity flow into your life.
It's rather disturbing to me that certain channels like TLC will seemingly bend over backward just to expose us to the dregs of society who will sell their story for money or their chance at 'fifteen minutes of fame'-- think "Honey Boo Boo" or "The Gypsy Sisters" show that I saw promoted last night-- or to people who could really need serious mental health treatment, such as these compulsive hoarders or the woman who was addicted to eating cat hair. Yes, you read that right-- she ate cat hair, and licked her cat in the brief promo on the screen. The thing is, TLC probably believes that they're giving their viewers what they clamor for. "Jon & Kate Plus 8" was a mega-popular series, as were other shows like "Little People, Big World", "17 (or 18, 19...) And Counting", "Toddlers & Tiaras" (where Honey Boo Boo came from) and now they are launching shows about "the real-life ER". The one common theme that links all of these shows is what TLC calls "life surprises" but what that really amounts to one thing: "we want to cater to your voyeurism".
I gave up television viewing years ago when 'reality TV' became the dominant form of programming. My reason for doing so is because I find the format utterly depressing. For one, there is little that is truly 'real' about it (I even call it 'surreality TV') because the moment you focus a camera lens on a human subject, it is most likely that they will begin to pose. When you gather multiple subjects in a small space to document 'their world', your objectivity is lost. The producers know that drama sells and thus the people being filmed are encouraged to produce ample amounts of it. Even if it is not a verbal directive, by pulling people who share animosity towards each other together when they would never be in the same space together naturally, you have taken them out of their 'reality' and put them in a 'surreal' situation. In real life, people don't always behave the way they do on camera, because the camera and crew is a stimulant of sorts. Even if there is a hidden camera, with no visible crew, if the people know they are being filmed, they will act (out) to fulfill the image they have in their mind about how the producers expect them to behave. This has been true for most reality TV shows ever since the genre started.
It doesn't matter if it is a group of contestants trying to outlast their competitors a la "Big Brother", "Hell's Kitchen", "The Bachelorette", "Survivor", or any of their knockoffs; it doesn't matter if it's a bunch of "Real Housewives" dishing out drama-fueled tirades against each other; it doesn't matter if it's Amish kids, Mormon wives, lobster fishermen, truck drivers, apprentices, bosses, or overweight people trying to slim down: when the camera is rolling, the story is being twisted, poked and prodded until it is no longer 'reality' and it is redesigned, re-edited, and remade, torn apart and then put back together until it is a packaged product waiting for consumption by the voyeurs who are looking for nothing more than a cheap thrill. There is no 'reality' to be found in these shows; to me, watching them is a total waste of time, and so I usually don't. But I find it very curious that other people do watch these shows, and religiously. To make it even more surprising, some of these people are ones who 'don't want drama' in their lives, yet will plop down on the sofa and watch others deal with the same drama they just said they didn't want. Well, to each their own, I guess.
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