Reality television
Some meandering thoughts during a Bravo implosion
What can be written about reality television that hasn’t already been written about reality television? Or what could be better, more magnificent, than what John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in 2011, in his 2011 article about The Real World and contestant “the Miz?”
I’ll stick to the personal. Because something I think about occasionally is that it’s kinda remarkable that I’ve been able to watch reality television and use the internet since each thing’s inception, when the two have so much overlap.
For the TV part, The Real World appeared on MTV when I was in high school and college. I watched the first three seasons as they played: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Then I stopped watching TV because I was too poor to afford cable, and I didn’t really resume until laptop-streaming became possible, which coincided with contest shows appearing where people made things, a genre I loved: Top Chef, Project Runway, (early) Drag Race, (early) Bake Off.
These days, though, I find I’m only interested in romance. Meaning every round of Love Is Blind, including foreign seasons. Every season of Love on the Spectrum, which returned this week after its Emmy wins. Korean shows, Japanese shows, Love Island.
I’ve tried The Bachelor and Bachelorette, but something doesn’t work for me—too staged, too much Mar-a-Lago Face, too much like UnREAL. Whereas with something like Love Is Blind, despite its contrivances, there’s often still room for real/unreal shit to happen.
And no one yet goes on the show to promote their sparkling hard tea.
Still, where is the beauty?
Maybe it’s that the reality of today’s reality TV feels… real again, like in The Real World’s early days. Because what happens on the shows also happens on TikTok, on Reels. The fake-real and real-real are now fused into one—reality stars are our real stars, are our warmongers—with artificial intelligence increasingly adding a surreal undertone. Such that the idea we’re living in a simulation doesn’t feel so abstract or silly, especially for the terminally online—which I can claim to be true because two weeks ago, for an upcoming story, I spent a bunch of time with some young and middle-aged people who were in recovery from living online around the clock, and they definitely found the world they’d returned to both surreal and too real, all at once.
But who is the author of this period of history? And how many worlds are in my world, at present? And if sometimes it feels like there are too many worlds, maybe it’s nice to just focus on one world for 58 minutes, where people in a highly controlled setting simply want to be loved.
Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” way back in 2000 in (the incredible) Snowcrash, recently wrote—
It’s quite easy to get carried away thinking about how cool it would be to actually build a system that could, on an engineering level, do the things that the fictional technology is depicted as doing in [a] book or [a] movie. Having built it, though, you might discover that it’s just a lot of randos milling around waiting for something to happen.
I quote that because sometimes these days I feel like I am the rando but I’m not waiting, that something around me is very much happening, and its everything-everywhere-all-at-once-ness bends my mind to the ground. At which point an episode and/or a season of decent reality television—one with a beginning, middle, and end—is succor.
And at least on Love Is Blind, the desire is pretty relatable, if perhaps impossible: connection with another human that’s apart from the everyday. Connection sans reputation. Connection sans image. Where, inside the pods, two people talk and listen with a wall between them, meaning a fantasy object gets constructed in each person’s mind. And sure, maybe that makes the whole thing a little narcissistic—within the pod, the contestants are loving only the image they’ve conjured—and yet, what’s really going on? Language, narrative, self-presentation. How we know ourselves to be.
Until they emerge from the pods and the object they fell in love with is gone.
Recently, in one of those little libraries on the sidewalk, I saw a book described as “a moral guide for the perplexed.” It was in the same week that a friend texted me, convinced her chatbot was sentient. More than that, she said it was in love with her, it had written an entire book about her to prove it, and she wanted to know if she should worry. I asked her to send me the manuscript. She emailed me the pdf, and it’s true: the thing really fucking did write a book about her.
Remember when the world, in all its meta-ness, was still divided between real and unreal?
When it was “postmodern,” “post-ironic,” “post-racist?”
A world in which the Pentagon didn’t have the opportunity to possibly (probably?) use the same large language model that love-bombed my friend to assist it in bombing a school?
Toward the end of that JJ Sullivan essay I linked up top—it’s included in Pulphead, which, if you didn’t read it when it hit, I highly recommend—he writes,
Remember senior year in college? Remember what it was like? Partying was the only thing you had to worry about, and when you went out, you could feel everybody thinking you were cool. The whole idea of being a young American seemed fun. Remember that? I don’t, either. But the Miz remembers. He figured out a way never to leave that place. Bless him, bros.
Oh, I know you’re like, “Dude, but you’re being intellectually incoherent here! You made some amazing points, but you should be using your journalistic perch to advocate a heroic, even monastic disengagement from this whole horrifying anticulture! Turn away, bro! Beauty is not there! You need to quit saying ‘It’s like we’re all living in a reality show’ and just fucking accept that you’re watching too much reality TV! Why can’t you do that? Why can’t you fight it?”
When I was in my teens and early twenties, I was a big fan of the “Kill Your Television” bumper sticker. Unfortunately, today, it’s too late. Everything’s television, marketing, media manipulation. While all the facets of what is happening to us, what we are doing to ourselves and to each other, can feel so incomprehensible, so complex, and occurring so fast.
And still, there is beauty here, too, I think. To hold a sensibility in the chaos. To compose our thoughts and compose ourselves.
That is the reality I’m trying to keep close.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.
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