not so real to me

I have no legitimate excuse. It was the end of a day of relatively stressful business meetings and last-minute shopping and what I needed was mindless downtime. I picked TV.

The first thing I found was a 90-minute retrospective of "great" television moments. Perfect. I laughed (again) at Lucy stomping grapes and Hawkeye and Monica explaining erogenous zones to Chandler. Then, suddenly, the screen was filled with ugly things and nasty people: the more contemporary and, I think, despicable "reality tv" moments.

I don't get reality tv on any level so I keep trying to explain its popularity to myself. It is, like much contemporary culture, mean-spirited, illustrative of mankind's worst, not best, moments and cynical. It projects and predicts a Darwinian world where winning is more important than being decent, where to succeed it is necessary to endure personal humiliation and to lose one's ethics.

In the end, the only thing I can believe is that those who watch this stuff like it because they believe it mirrors the world in which they find themselves. They must feel all of the things they see on reality tv are a metaphor for their own lives. They connect. I'm glad to say I do not.