My sister and mother love watching what are called "reality" TV series. These are supposedly real life situations filmed for the purpose of entertainment. The majority of these shows profile either the most odd, absurd and extreme predicaments of human life or (in most cases) some washed-up celebrity who, for some reason, has a show on one of the many cable networks on weeknights.
I don't watch any of these shows, so there is often an odd silence when my sister mentions one of them to me. Not only have I never heard of any of them, but I draw a complete blank when she tells me who stars in them. When I'm at her house, she will show me some episodes she's recorded on her DVR. One of the newer ones that has premiered is called "Atlanta Plastic", which airs on Lifetime. The show follows a group of African-American plastic surgeons whose services are procured by people who have body issues. From the mundane to the outright strange, the doctors perform a myriad of procedures for people who essentially have money to waste, simply because they don't like the way they look. Between the oddballs and surgury footage, I didn't find it entertaining, to say the least.
Cable channels like TLC, VH-1, MTV, Lifetime, etc, have uilt entire primetime lineups around people who either don't need to be spotlighted, have no business on TV or are simply not doing anything important enough to merit any real attention. Shows like "Teen Mom", "19 Kids and Counting", "Basketball Wives", etc, make no sense to me. What's so intriguing about a man and woman who have 19 kids? If you watch MTV or VH-1 on a weeknight, you'll instantly become privy to a simply truth about a large portion of the American TV audience: people will watch anything on TV. ANYthing...
There's obvious staging in theres shows, at least the ones I've seen. Some of them aren't even "real". The series "Catfish" doesn't pass the smell test with me. How are these people duped by such sloppy con artists and impostors? The hosts of the show spend literally five minutes of Google and are able to "expose" these people; why couldn't the person being "catfished" have done this themselves? This show is really fishy.
I could go on, but I won't. And it seems this is the programming formula for ALL cable channels nowadays. Why hire writers when you can find 90s hip hop stars no one remembers, follow them around with cheap digital cameras, watch them act a fool and package it as five seasons of "Love and Hip Hop Atlanta"? Remember when VH-1 stood for "Video Hits One"? When it was an off-shoot of MTV for older audiences, that showed music videos and concerts? A&E showed arts and entertainment programming like operas and literary works; now, we must endure shows about people fighting over abandoned storage units and Duck Dynasty.
Besides the occasional Seinfeld rerun, news and movies, I don't even watch the majority of the channels I subscribe to. I watch more streaming stuff than actually broadcast programs. And it seems that each week, a new, pitiful reality series debuts with the same, invariable formula of oddballs, has-beens and freaks. It's enough to make you hate TV.
