From Kind To Judgy
The cultural evolution of our TV watching habits highlights our current state of dysfunction
The 90s became famous, amongst other things, for a style of television that was used to peel back the layers of what I will charitably here call “the human condition”. Chief amongst them was The Jerry Springer Show which, debuting on 30 September 1991, brought to television screens a carefully scripted but viscerally powerful mix of controversial human behavior and hot, topical but typically low-brow subjects.
Despite a shaky beginning (where the show’s host, Jerry Springer, focused on political issues because of his own background) it quickly rose to prominence leading to a syndication across 40 countries and eight foreign-language imitators. But what it debuted, which is relevant to this piece here, is a willingness to scrape ever lower in the human behavior barrel, in a constant chase for higher ratings.
The Jerry Springer Show ran across 27 seasons and was a success for the exact same reasons Reality TV shows today are successful: it was cheap to produce and it invited judgement. Three decades later seasoned viewers of reality TV shows such as Too Hot To Handle, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Selling the OC will argue that it was tame, that nothing has essentially changed and that the only difference between “then” and “now” lies in the fact that 33 years later producers of Reality TV shows trust their audiences well enough to no longer script the shows.
I am going to contradict all of that. Not because the technicalities are incorrect, they’re not. Indeed, The Jerry Springer Show was highly edited and carefully scripted and Selling the OC, for instance, is not scripted at all (technically) but because there is a certain amount of disingenuousness in both the claim that Reality TV is reality and that what has changed is to be found in the quality we call “trust”.
To understand that better however we need to better understand what it is that draws us to such shows in the first place.
We Don’t Still Know How To Behave
One of the foundations of my book “Intentional” is that none of us truly know how to behave and certainly no one knows how to behave in every situation we’re likely to encounter in our life.
To guide us in this task we rely on a complex layer of observed behaviors that become the culturally defined and socially accepted norms we use. Reality TV, just like The Jerry Springer Show, activate in us an emotional trigger called vicarious embarrassment (VE) which is triggered “by the observation of others’ pratfalls or social norm violations.” The higher the vicarious embarrassment we experience, as an audience watching a social norm violation, the more we engage the centers of the brain responsible for the Theory of Mind, empathy and social identity.
All of these are concepts we use to make choices and decisions in our mind that lead to real-world actions. In other words, by observing, feeling shocked and judging we also run hypothetical scenarios in our minds that allows us to better navigate the real-world we live in.
Theoretically, then, Reality TV is a positive watching experience that allows us to feel good about ourselves and become better people because we can develop strategies that will help us skirt the pitfalls we witness on-screen. Theoretically.
The difference between theory and practice lies in the difference of three little details that are obscured by the temporal distance between The Jerry Spinger Show and today’s Reality TV shows but which nevertheless play a key role in understanding how we see them and what we learn from them.
Lack Of Scripting Doesn’t Mean Lack Of Direction
To succeed, any reality TV format really needs to activate our vicarious embarrassment response. It needs, in other words, to shock us into engaging. The Jerry Springer Show relied on its host to frame what was happening, act as the social norm defining guide and ensure audience and, by association, viewer participation through the direct soliciting of advice to help solve the “issues” faced by the Show’s guests.
Reality TV’s seemingly unscripted format still requires engagement and some kind of dramatic arc development which is why it relies on clever editing and “confessional” interviews straight to the camera to provide context and add drama.
The lack of script (let’s call it “Detail 1”) doesn’t imply lack of scripting, this still happens through selective editing. But the fact that it appears to be scriptless and therefore more authentic also removes some of the burden of responsibility for what happens, how things appear and how the stage is set for events from the shoulders of the director and editors of each show. This often leads to a distortion of the perception of reality by viewers of the show and even those who are savvy enough to understand that there is a certain “shaping” of what they see are inadvertently affected through inevitable comparisons between the on-screen behavior and its outcomes and their own.
This leads us directly to the second detail that’s different between The Jerry Springer Show and today’s reality TV shows: Lack of framing. (This is “Detail 2”). In his monologues Jerry Springer, acted on his show as a kind of impartial arbiter. Whether you directly agreed or disagreed with what he said and how he presented things he nevertheless provided a relatively measured (by necessity) point of view that acted as an immediate anchor of sorts.
As viewers we had the freedom to land to one or the other side of a judgement regarding the on-screen shenanigans but tethered as we were by the framing of the show’s host our judgement was likely to take place within certain parameters.
A classic example of this approach is found in the episode that featured Annabel Chong who was there to explain the reasons for her participation in what, at the time, was the record setting number of times she’d had sex in a filmed gangbang.
Irrespective of where you land in the moral outrage spectrum you will have to admit after viewing the clip above that the entire episode is handled with a certain amount of decorum and with a skillful amount of sensitivity.
Today’s reality TV shows provide no such framing. We’re instead left to arrive at our own conclusion of what it is we see and the “right” or “wrong” of it. The reason this is a problem lies in the fact that as the author Anaïs Nin wrote in her 1961 book Seduction of the Minotaur “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
When we’re left without guidelines to help us bound what we see our sole recourse is our own perception and perception is created by a mix of memories, knowledge and experience. After expectations perception is the second foundational step that leads us our sense of reality and the fashioning of the beliefs that guide our behavior.
In each age group and each culture this is going to be different. Left to our own devices the ‘lessons’ we draw are going to vary wildly even within a subset of individuals of similar culture and background.
The final step however, the missing “Detail 3”, that completely casts us adrift in a moral vacuum from which we may emerge only with our sense of personal gain as the sole guide; is the difference in closure between The Jerry Springer Show and today’s reality TV shows.
There Are No Guardrails
Every episode of The Jerry Springer Show ended with “Jerry’s Final Thought” and an admonition to “take care of yourself and each other”.
Silly at it may sound and highly scripted as it may have been it also acted as one final guardrail. Sure, our reaction might have been a little over the top and our own judgement might have gone a little past the acceptable standards and boarded on the extreme but here was a final piece of anchoring that served to bring us back down to our shared reality.
When these three key details are missing everything we watch and everything we judge is subject to our own unique interpretation. The elements missing from reality TV transform each show into a performative piece committed to chasing higher and higher shock value in pursuit of ratings.
The Gladiatorial Games in ancient Rome, evolved from a highly orchestrated whilst still deadly form of fighting that “offered spectators an example of Rome’s martial ethics” and commemorated specific, culturally important events into a lavish bloodbath designed for distraction and entertainment under Nero who was hated for it.
What does this show about us today? That we seek to lose ourselves in and be entertained by the on-screen dysfunction of others? That we’re so used to the hits of dopamine triggered by vicarious embarrassment that nothing truly shocks us anymore and we need now an ever increased sense of moral outrage to satisfy us?
Or, that since social norms are no longer defined because reality TV shows cut across generations and cultures, we’re left spinning in the dark drawing our own moral conclusions according to the moment’s inclination?
All of the above, perhaps?
I’m obviously leaning towards that.
It’s not that we’re any less intelligent, moral or knowledgeable than before. As individuals we’re not. But we’re more harassed by the complexities of our time and still learning the tropes of the digital world, social media and an always-on, serve-on-demand digital culture.
That is an energetic load that we all carry to varying degrees. When we’re asked to, on top of it, create boundaries and guardrails for ourselves we’re more than likely to not to. And that leaves the door wide open for the extreme reactions of outrage we see over every perceived slight online and offline.
It would be easy, at this stage, to blame reality TV producers for that, but they’re doing exactly what’s dictated by the evolution of the medium: cutting costs and chasing ratings. So the rest is up to us. The choice of whether to better understand what is happening, why and why we react to it the way we do or simply to react and (maybe) never think about it at all, lies with us.
In the evolution from The Jerry Springer Show to today’s reality TV shows the burden of guiding reactions and judgements has shifted from those producing content to those consuming it (and consider how true that is in the social media domain as well).
Right now, it is we who are being found wanting.
