My Opinion of Reality TV

Plinky asked, “What do you think of real­i­ty tele­vi­sion? Do you watch any real­i­ty TV shows?”

I don’t watch any real­i­ty TV shows, and I detest every one that I’ve seen except The Sing-Off. Even with it, all I care about is lis­ten­ing to the music. I can’t stand the non­sense with the judges, the “let’s take the con­tes­tants to a school/senior center/etc.” seg­ments, or any of the “mak­ing of” bits. The per­son­al­i­ties usu­al­ly detract from the music, if you ask me. 

All the oth­er real­i­ty shows seem to require arti­fi­cial dra­ma of some sort, which is dis­gust­ing and child­ish. Who wants to see that crap? Not me, for sure. I don’t like con­flict between peo­ple in my per­son­al life and I don’t want to see it between strangers on tele­vi­sion with­out a real­ly good plot and way bet­ter act­ing than any­body on any real­i­ty show is capa­ble of. 

I use the tele­vi­sion for enter­tain­ment, which means escape. I want to see some­thing that’s hon­est­ly fic­tion­al and very dif­fer­ent from my real life or any­thing I’m like­ly to encounter, so I watch foren­sic dra­mas, police procedurals/mysteries, and sci­ence fiction/fantasy shows when I do watch television.