I was sitting and watching a video from funny YouTube man We're In Hell about the Netflix Show Love Is Blind. It's a meditative piece and really gets into the weeds about bad media and our relationship to it.
But I also have something of a personal story about this to share.
My partner and I watch a lot of MTV's Catfish. It's not the trashiest show but it's not prestige television by any means. I'm not pretentious enough to say I'm above it, but it's kind of something to watch while you eat breakfast on a Saturday morning. Sometimes there is genuine emotional investment; You see someone you're really rooting for and I imagine that this connection happens more often than people would like to admit. Sometimes it's the same as ragebait content, someone does something so objectionable that you're hate watching.
Sometimes it's just messy and the drama is exquisite.
I come up against how exploitative these shows are all the time. For all the pretense that Max and Nev are crusaders fighting off the evil doers catphishing innocent people, they're profiting off human misery. Like sometimes I feel bad for the catfish because they let a silly prank or game go on for too long, genuinely not meaning to do actual harm, and then they get blasted on international television. Like, all of us can be mean spirited or do something we later come to regret, but exactly zero of my mistakes have one million views. No one on the street is going to recognize me from that time I said something shitty, or when I was a jerk to someone. And I also think the show is pretty aware of this, Max and Nev try their best to give the situation a happy ending... But they also escalate it to a messy in person conflict first.
The other thing is that... We know right?
Several of these are scripted, most of them use 'evil editing' to portray a situation as more dramatic than it actually is, sometimes the ADR is so blatant that they're literally putting words into someone's mouth, there is an amount of kayfabe at play here. Sometimes it's a little, sometimes it's a lot, but Reality TV is not reality... It is a heightened reality that seeks to first and foremost entertain. People are absolutely playing it up for the cameras, we have no idea what happens between cuts and the cuts are there for us, not for the subjects. I could make an argument for why this is enjoyable, about the refreshing feeling of media that doesn't hide its artifice and puts it boldly on display, about TV made for the lowest common denominator being obviously enjoyable to anyone with eyes like it's the Big Mac of audio-visual experiences... But like, when Nev busts down a door to confront that motherfucker who was catfishing that poor, very naive girl, you just... You're there. Get his ass, Nev.
Reality TV is enjoyable, bad TV can be very enjoyable, I don't really have to explain why. Is it good for us? Like anything... In moderation, our vices are what make us human.
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