By Karl Cable
I'm going to level with you right from the start and let you know that I haven't seen more than a few minutes of Survivor. You also need to know that I consider that to be my good fortune.

Now before you go away all mad, telling me that I don't know what I'm missing, at least hear me out.

Because of the fact that I work for an NBC affiliate, and because the job that I do at times has made me sit in Master Control at my station for prolonged shifts, I'm well acquainted with the genre. I've seen NBC's pretty dismal Lost and also Fear Factor. And believe me, I've heard a lot of people talking about Survivor. And let's face it-how much about Survivor is there really to figure out? I can know what it's about without ever having seen a second of it.

This stuff passes itself off as "Reality Television," and that's really where I begin to part ways with it. Why on earth would anyone consider this to be reality?

But it's completely unscripted, you may be saying, and the people are Real!

Okay, let's take a look at that. Thousands and thousands of people want to be on this show. They can't put them all on, can they? That's called casting, and it's where reality begins to turn and sadly wave goodbye. If you want to be on the show, then it follows that you're one of the kind of people who really wants to be on tv. (Believe it or not, there are people who actually don't want to be on television. These shows aren't interested in them.) But once you begin that casting process, you start to pare down the subtleties of your own personality, if you want to get chosen. Subtleties aren't part of the story on the "reality" shows. The audience wants to either like you or dislike you, and they don't care about the rest.

The casting is very clever. There are attractive people and likable people, and there are egomaniacs and schemers. No matter who you are, you can find characters to root for or against. Yes, I said "characters," and the reason I did is that by the time you've been chosen to be a cast member, you've probably winnowed your personality down to the bare essentials. And at some point, nearly everything you do has been observed by at least one guy holding a video camera. There's powerful inducement here to start play-acting. And lest we forget, people who act for a living are also "real people." They just make their livings play-acting, and they're far, far better at it than the folks on the "reality" shows.

And as for unscripted, that's very much a relative term. In the sense that the people involved in the shows do not recite lines from a "script," you could say that the shows are unscripted. However, the producers make sure that the folks have plenty to keep them occupied. First, get to know the other members of your tribe/team. A lot of posturing is highly desirable here. Then, another day, you have to eat some goat's eyes. Then another day you have to wade through leech-infested water. Then another day you have to eat live insects. There's an awful lot of disgusting eating and drinking on these shows. Why would anyone eat a pig's heart raw or drink some slop that looks like vomit?

Money.

As with just about everything else here in the good ol' USA, money justifies everything. There is virtually nothing too abhorrent to do, and no depth too low to sink, for the right sum of money. On these shows we see vicious behavior and backstabbing rewarded. The fact that there are camera operators covering the whole thing just adds to the unreality of the situation for the players. Hey, they aren't screwing over that person they befriended a couple days ago-it's just a show!

You see - and you can call me an idiot if you wish, or you can say that I'm a pie-in-the-sky idealist - but I'm just not all that crazy about living in a world where people feel justified in doing odious things to each other because there was a camera pointed at them and a million dollars was at stake. I think we can be better than that.

But it's only entertainment, you may be saying. I'm taking it much too seriously. Well, okay, but isn't there better entertainment available to you than this? This is entertainment on the soap opera level. Which is precisely how people sound when they talk about these shows, Survivor especially. This person whom they can't stand, and that person whom they really like, and what should happen to them. It's exactly the way that people talk about soap operas.

I guess we have Allen Funt to blame for this. He was the first guy to really make an industry out of pointing a camera at regular folks. Only it wasn't a camera, it was a microphone. Funt started Candid Microphone in the dark days before television, but when tv came along, he knew that was where he belonged. Funt's Candid Camera was a gentle show, though, and existed for no other reason than to provide light entertainment.

In the late 70's, when a strike by actors threatened the tv seasons, shows like Real People came into being. The shows were cheap to produce, and best of all, the people in them weren't carrying those pesky SAG and AFTRA cards. Fortunately for the networks, people couldn't think of anything to do other than sit in front of their tv sets, and that crop of "reality" shows had some modest success. When the actor's strike ended, though, many of the shows bit the dust and the rest followed before too long.

The current crop was born out of the same situation, only this time it was preventive. The job actions this time were going to be writers and actors, so the networks trotted out that tired old horse. The threatened strikes never materialized, though. So the networks had this programming sitting there, they might as well use it. And what do you know? The show's a hit! And it could be done for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to mount a one-hour drama series. In effect, this is the network tv programming equivalent of downsizing. With enough slick packaging and the right kind of promotion, it can become a Cultural Phenomenon!

But as with all Cultural Phenomena in our country, what's hot today is a has-been tomorrow. It's starting to look as though the "reality" craze is winding down. Just like the last time, we're deciding to move on to other things. And maybe that dose of reality we got last September had a hand in that, too. When you have a chance to witness reality at its most brutal and horrific on your tv, maybe you start to lose your appetite for watching vain people screw each other over and eat disgusting food.

At least I'm hoping so.

(C) 2002 - Karl Cable