Reality TV: Good or Bad?

[Arnwyn]

I'm going to say "Bad" and "No thank you"...

... but I will cop to watching one reality TV show: Amazing Race.

 

[el-remmen]

I watch Survivor and the Amazing Race, but they are more like game shows than things like The Osbournes or Keeping Up With the Kardasi-ughs!.

I guess Survivor has some "reality" aspect to it with the dramas that go on - but ultimately it turns social situations punctuated with physical and mental challenges into a game.

 

[Alzrius]

Bad. When I want to watch "reality" I'll go outside and do it myself.

 

[Felon]

I've recently acquired a guilty pleasure in the form of Kitchen Nightmares. On the one hand, it's entertaining and informative to see what causes a restaurant to fail; it's a volatile business that can make you wealthy or poor very quickly. On the other hand, the show is pretty obviously staged, hyperdramatized. an heavily edited.

I have to wonder what is going through the restaurant owner's heads when they invite Ramsey to come film his show there. By now, it's obvious that he's going to deem all of the food to be bland, tasteless crap, and worse still, he's going to show the kitchen to be a disgusting pigsty. That's the stuff that's going to stick in a potential customer's mind, not the wonderful one-night reinvention that Ramsey stages with actors hired from a Craigslist ad.

 

[Orius]

I think that people who watch reality TV should lose their TV privileges--for ever hour they watch, they can't watch any TV for a year. And people who make reality TV should be forcefully drafted into military service.

Dammit Ari, I wanted to give reality TV the slagging it deserves, but you pretty much stole any thunder I could muster with these two magnificent sentences.

But when its bad, it is consistently the worst thing on the airwaves.

Yes well, reality TV turns Sturgeon's Law on its head by being nothing BUT crap for the most part.

For me it's a waste of good time slots.

I agree, but I see no reason to be so nice about it.

Well, "Reality TV" is a new term that now covers a LOT of genres- technically, sports is "reality tv."

This does not convince me to like reality TV because I hate both equally.

I can't stand the exclusionary crap in many of the shows, there's too much of that IRL to make it good entertainment. Putting humanity's worst excesses of small-minded mean-spiritedness on public display as the genre does does not further the advance of human culture.

Then you've got hosts on some of these shows who make a living doing nothing but cutting people down as far as they can go. That makes me absolutely detest American Idol. Not only does it pander to the foolish desire in our culture to seek fame, but it also has that detestable snarky pissant git Simon Cowell, who is reason enough not to watch the show. That Ramsey is just as bad sometimes. I'd love to eat his cooking sometime so I could tell HIM how much it all tastes like crap (even if it's good). I give The Apprentice a pass here only because Donald Trump is known to be utterly unlikeable, and he knows it. He's not necessarily doing it to entertain us (and likely doesn't give a what we think of him anyway).

 

[Aus_Snow]

'Reality' TV? Sure, I've heard of it.

It doesn't surprise me that it exists, or that it has gained such a following. So many people who are so very bored in this, the first world.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not only does it pander to the foolish desire in our culture to seek fame, but it also has that detestable snarky pissant git Simon Cowell, who is reason enough not to watch the show.

Now, I have no love for American Idol. However, Simon Cowell, like a top predator, performs a vital service. There are people who appear on that show who have ZERO business being in the singing biz (at least, not in pop music)...and they need to be told this hard, cold fact.

And the only difference between what he does on AI and what happens behind closed doors every day at Sony or any other label is that at Sony it happens behind closed doors. Simon does it on national TV.

That Ramsey is just as bad sometimes. I'd love to eat his cooking sometime so I could tell HIM how much it all tastes like crap (even if it's good).

As I recall, Ramsay has been awarded more Michelin stars than any other chef in history, and currently has more top-rated restaurants than any other chef in the biz. He also generally has profitable restaurants in a business in which failure within a year is the norm.

IOW, if he's telling someone that something about the way they're running their eatery is wrong, chances are good that he's right.

Not that he's perfect- on the original BBC version of the series, he talked about the failure of one of his own places that nearly bankrupted him. But he's right much more often than he is wrong.

As for his attitude & mouth? Perhaps, like performers in other walks of life, he's playing up to the stereotype of his profession- foul-tempered and egotistical chefs are the stuff of legend.

 

[Mistwell]

Well, my wife was on a reality TV show (Who Wants to be a Superhero, S2), so I am biased on the topic.

I like some reality TV. I am not a fan of the MTV shows, or dating shows, or any show where the point seems to be to make fun of people and show the dark, greedy side of humanity.

But some of them are interesting sociological experiments, and some are interesting physical and mental challenges where you see what the human spirit is capable of when pushed hard. I tend to like some of American Idol and Amazing Race for example. I even like some of the documentary-style reality shows like Ghost Hunters and Deadliest Catch.

So like any genre, there are good shows and bad shows.

And as for the person bashing sitcoms, some of the best TV right now can be found in sitcoms like Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother. There is some good in that genre as well.