In two weeks, CBS’ Survivor—granddaddy of American reality television—will return to the airwaves for a 236th straight season. (Actually, it’s only been on the air since 2000; it just seems longer.) Once again, millions will watch a gaggle of regular ol’ Joes and Janes outplay, outwit and out-eat each other.
But are they so regular anymore? Really?
It was interesting to read Meredith Whitmore’s post on Kim Kardashian a couple of days back. Kardashian, Meredith reported, parlayed an all-too-real sex tape into a reality show career, which she then parlayed into real, honest-to-goodness fame. Now, taking a cue from Kardashian and others, it seems like loads of folks are turning to reality television to stitch together their own 15 minutes of fame—so much so that reality shows are having a hard time finding “real” people anymore.
In a story in The New York Times on Aug. 25, many reality show casting directors bemoaned the new “reality” in which they work.
“I want people fresh to the idea of doing this and not so focused on being on television,” says Lacey Pemberton, casting director for ABC’s The Bachelor. “At the end of the day, I still find it, but do I have to go through more now? I do.”
Bob DeBitetto, president and general manager for the A&E Network, has seen much the same phenomenon. “When we started Storage Wars [a show about folks who buy the contents of unpaid-for storage units], our guys would go to work and find maybe 20 or 30 people at the auctions they went to,” he says. “Now, we’re getting 200. There’s no question that when people see utterly unknown people blow up, they want to be famous, too.”
It’s weird, this compulsion to be famous. I made light of it in a column last year, but the whole phenomenon still puzzles me a little. I’m a guy who likes to sit in the back row at every meeting, tries to squirrel away in an out-of-the-way booth every time I go to a restaurant. The idea of notoriety makes me a little squeamish—so much so that I’m writing this blog post under an assumed name.
No, no. Not really. And I guess one could argue that the impulse to write for an audience (like I’m doing now) isn’t that far removed from blathering on about one’s life on an MTV reality show.
And yet, there a difference—or at least I’d like to think so. Maybe some of us (most of us?) wouldn’t turn down a dollop of fame … if it came our way for the right reasons. We want folks to hear us ’cause we think we have something to say. We want people to notice us because we’re worth noticing—not simply because we’re noticeable.
Reality show fame-seekers feel to me like they want to be noticed because being noticed feels kinda good. And they figure if they get a little bit of fame, they’ll be in a position to get more fame down the road, which in turn breeds more fame and so on. It’s like loving a Ferrari, but not much caring whether the thing comes with an engine.
Back in the ancient days before I began working for Plugged In, I watched Survivor. Those first couple of seasons made for pretty intriguing television, what with all its wacky contests and Darwinian duplicity. And the show’s characters felt as if they were snatched right off the street and dropped in an outlandish situation, not really knowing what to do or how to play.
But now the situation isn’t so outlandish. We’ve seen it for 11 years, after all. The contestants have had more than a decade to study the show—not only the strategies to “win,” but strategies to build an audience, to leverage their exposure on Survivor for another fame-building venue. And then another. Hey, if it worked for Boston Rob, some of these contestants might be telling themselves, why not me? Maybe these aren’t so much real people anymore as they are simply another form of actor—one that works solely off script.
And it makes me wonder … just how “real” is reality television anymore?
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