The Three Levels of Reality TV

There’s a Dante’s Inferno joke in there somewhere

I went to get a haircut the other day, and the barber shop had Canadian Big Brother on. Yes, the reality TV show. And not just the show, the Canadian version. Apparently the folks at the barbershop are fans. I vaguely recall watching half a season of Big Brother (the real American version) some time ago and abandoning it as awful, bottom-feeder entertainment. And if an American thing is awful, you can bet the Canadian version is even worse (the Trucker strike being the exception that proves the rule). But on my way home I got thinking about reality TV in general, and figured why not? Why shouldn’t I write my thoughts about it? So here you go: something resembling a unified theory of Reality Television.  

First, let’s define it. Reality TV is a type of television/streaming serial featuring non-actors not-acting, more or less. One of the earliest iterations of reality TV is something like Bassmasters, a show following fishermen around on their boats, fishing. Reality TV treats the non-actors not-acting as if they were still characters in an ongoing drama, and this is what separates it from, say, televised league sports, the Olympics, or the Miss America pageant. But there are many rooms in this mansion. There are three levels of reality TV. 

Level 1: Shows about talented people being talented

This level ultimately involves competition, where people who can do cool things compete against other people who can do cool things, to see who can produce the coolest results. The 800-pound gorilla here is American Idol, though The Voice is giving it a good go. The Got Talent (America, Britain, and elsewhere) shows are titanically popular, and serve as a current catch-all for the viewing audience’s desire to see people do things that most people can’t do. The Got Talent shows also highlight that this model translates all over the world (there are multinational versions of many singing shows specifically). And sometimes what comes up there is pretty amazing. 

Betcha didn’t know Poland has its own version of Hell’s Kitchen, didja!?

There are also dance shows (So You Think You Can Dance produced some really great performances), magic shows (Penn and Teller’s Fool Us fits here), and there’s pretty much a talent competition show for anything. Many even involve producing tangible product. Forged in Fire is for metalsmiths, Top Shot is for competitive shooters, Ink Master is for tattooists, Face Off is for prosthetic makeup artists, and on and on. The biggest category of “make stuff” shows, though, are the cooking competition shows, from the now-venerable Iron Chef to the currently-on-Fox Crime Scene Kitchen and Next Level Chef. There’s a deep bench of these shows, and they all feature people with genuine talent actively competing with others who have genuine talent to see who is somehow “most talented”. 

Mentioning cooking shows in general, though, starts sliding us into level 2. 

Level 2: Shows about interesting people being interesting

Cooking shows don’t have to be competitions at all, and for a long time they weren’t. All the way back to Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet or Julia Child’s The French Chef, these are shows where people may be showing off a talent, but not in a way that is self-aggrandizing. They aren’t making a big deal about being awesome themselves. They just want to explore food and bring you along. 

Some non-competitive cooking shows straddle the line between levels 1 and 2, though most of them find their way in here. Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives probably sits exactly on the line. It might be joined by RuPaul’s Drag Race, depending on your personal view of drag-as-talent. 

Cooking shows are joined here by the home improvement shows. There is an effectively endless array of these, and HGTV is paying the bills with them. There’s a line-straddling segment of these, too, where a show like Rock the Block pits home renovators against each other to see who can create cooler homes, but by and large these shows have been comfortably level 2 since This Old House or New Yankee Workshop. 

This guy may defy definition, but for now I’ll put him here. Tell me about it in the comments.

A big chunk of this section belongs to outfits like the History Channel, which maintains a deep bench of shows featuring people in unique lines of work or who just lead lives that most normies would find alien at best and frightening at worst. Ax Men, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, Swamp People, and on and on and on. The Duck Dynasty folks live here. Ghost Hunters lives here. Deadliest Catch lives here. Dirty Jobs lives here. For better or for worse, Naked and Afraid probably lives here (and has for almost 20 seasons!). 

Again, these are shows carefully edited and semi-scripted to adopt some of the trappings of TV drama. They have “characters” and are telling “stories,” more or less. But what you see on screen is, at its core, real people letting you have a glimpse into their lives, which are generally focused around some job or activity that is foreign to most people. That can be interesting. It can even be educational. It can even be fascinating. 

Sometimes, though, those things aren’t interesting, educational, or even fascinating because of the activity being put on display. It’s because of the “characters” themselves. And that leads us to level 3, the bottom of the barrel. 

Level 3: Shows about terrible people being terrible

Honey Boo-Boo needs no real introduction at this stage, does it? If Food Network, HGTV, and the History Channel share most of level 2, TLC owns most of level 3. Sister Wives might be the line-straddler here. My wife watches the heck out of Sister Wives, and it was interesting for a while to see how this big polygamous family lived its collective life. As the show has gone on, however, (like 17 seasons and counting!), things curdled, and the whole thing turned into a wheezing train wreck of broken relationships and achingly clueless people pretending they had discovered something about themselves. 

Ditto anything Kardashian. ‘Nuff said about that. 

Basically, if you find yourself being embarrassed for the people you’re watching, you’re watching a level 3 show. Looking at you, The Bachelor. Looking at you, My 600-Pound Life. Looking at you, Dance Moms. Looking at you, Real Housewives of Fill-in-the-Blank. Might be side-eying you, Fear Factor. 

I once heard someone call the host of Cheaters a misery vampire. That whole show feeds on, gorges on, the misery of pathetic people trying to escape terrible people. There’s a tangible sense of voyeurism in a level 3 show, like the people on screen might not be fully cognizant of how the showrunners are taking advantage of them.

Chant it with me: Jer-RY! Jer-RY! Jer-RY!

It’s hard to keep talking about level 3 shows without feeling complicit in some kind of victimization. Maybe it’s the people on the show victimizing each other. Maybe it’s the showrunners victimizing their subjects. Maybe, and perhaps worst, it’s the enabling of the victimization: the showrunners are letting terrible people be terrible to each other, seeing who can out-dirtbag the rest. Survivor started that trend, and that brings us back around to Big Brother. 

You may see mention of something like Survivor here and say “I thought you said competition shows were the top level.” But remember level 1 is about talented people being talented, not competitive people being competitive. Competition for its own sake can turn dark in a hurry. The whole idea of a couple of dozen “ordinary” people shoved together and then given license to start “eliminating” each other should make a conscious viewer a little queasy. Where does that end? Who can contract the most horrible STD? Who can survive longest without dialysis? The Most Dangerous Game, but for real? Squid Game, but for real? The Hunger Games, but for real?

Bum Fights? Oh, wait …  

This is one of the worst days of your life, and … action!  

So there you go, a quasi-neo-Dante exploration of the levels of Reality TV hell. Let’s bring this to a wrap-up. Obviously, taste is subjective. How you watch reality TV is up to you. But it’s also true that eyeballs on entertainment incentivize more of that entertainment. What do you really want more of?