The vagueries of reality television

Today yet another story broke about an incident involving reality television participants.  I won't refer to them as celebrities because, frankly, they aren't.  But with each passing season, the absurdity that is reality television reaches new lows.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do watch a couple of reality shows.  The competitions I watch are Top Chef and The Amazing Race.  I also watch Wicked Tuna and Yukon Men.  Beyond that, if I catch an episode of a reality show, that's about as much as I can handle.

A couple of years ago I got hooked on watching an arc or two of The Real Housewives of....  The one I started with was Orange County, because one of the wives there was a former model who was in a ZZ Top video (Sharp Dressed Man, I think it was) on whom I'd had a crush back in the day and who had married a baseball player.  I didn't know who the baseball player was, tuned in to watch it and found out one of the women originally came from where I used to live.  Pretty quickly it became evident that it was nothing more than high school with more money and older women, because the things that happened were straight out of high school.  The only new things for me, at least, was the amount of plastic surgery; I don't remember any of the girls getting plastic surgery in my high school.

Spurred on by that, I then saw the New Jersey version.  With all due respect to the denizens of New Jersey, you're nuts.  Well, at least the women on that show were.  Talk about stereotypes!  The reason I watched this arc was because they teased that there were going to be arrests of the cast.  There weren't, really, but just to see how low people who think they're highbrow can go.  Wow.

The other one I watched for a short time was the New York one.  I watched this because the transparent superiority complexes these women held were hysterical.  One involved Bethanny, the darling of women everywhere who've overcome weight and other personal issues, who was selected to be the cover model for some society magazine over on the East Coast.  I'm sure to her and her set, this was a great honor.  In talking about it to the camera, she said that it was a really big deal, a real coup d' etat.  Immediately, I checked to see whether our government had been felled by this development and was relieved to find that the Republic still stood.

The report today involves those wacky New Jersey folks whose husbands have allegedly assaulted a photographer.  I have no earthly idea who's in the right and who's in the wrong.  And as far as the press is concerned, I think the vast majority of them deserve a good, old fashioned horse whipping.  But this notion that because someone is a participant on a reality show gives them a heightened status just defies reason.  All they've done is allow a station to film them in artificial situations that very few hoi polloi can experience.  The idea that these housewives are real in the sense that they represent what real housewives go through is a joke.  That why when they speak of toppling governments with their appearances on the covers of society magazines I laugh even louder.

We're in an age where everyone has to be acknowledged, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter or reality shows.  Andy Warhol may have been a little nutty but he certainly hit the nail on the head with his comment about everyone having his fifteen minutes of fame.  The problem is, these reality participants sometimes get more than a few hours' worth of fame.  The trend nowadays is to go from one reality show to another; one of my biggest gripes about The Amazing Race is that it's allowed participants from Survivor and Big Brother to participate on the Race.

Yes, there is an inherent hypocrisy in my complaint, since I write my blog.  But my identity remains unknown but to a few people.  I'm not out there posting pictures about me and my accomplishments.  My sardonic and sometimes caustic views do, it can be argued, suggest that I think I'm better than people which, in limited instances, I do.  For example, I know the difference between a coup and a coup d' etat, no matter how poor I am.  But these are more in keeping with the essays of Addison and Carlyle or even Benjamin Franklin.  I like to write and I'm opinionated, hence the blog.

Besides, as Charles Barkley is wont to say, opinions are like buttholes -- everyone's got one.

(c) 2013  The Truxton Spangler Chronicles