I hated American Bandstand. I hated Star Search, Puttin on the hits, Solid Gold, and all the other dance shows, talent searches, and other pre-cursors to reality TV. So when "The Real World" slurped out of MTV like a re-purposed K-ration/Canned Dog Food, I didn't even slow down my channel surfing. During it's evolution, though, reality TV has spawned and re-spawned to the point of proliferation. It's amazing how something so "done 15 years ago" can be re-packaged, sold to the masses, and have it received like it's never been dreamed of before.
I hate reality TV because it has trapped friends and loved ones in its numbing web of substantive malnutrition and informational deprivation. I see people with master degrees, bachelors, hard, honest workers, sit down and laugh at the monontony like it's subliminally laced with crack. I know they're not lacking of intelligence or comprehension skills, but I still cannot generate a fully logical reason why good people rot their grey matter with the mess.
I want reality TV to die like American Bandstand, Solid Gold, and that game show where people played coin-ops for cash and prizes(I think..). I want to take the producers, TV execs that approved these fecal nuggets of media, their VC contributors, take all their money and buy the largest square acreage plot of land anywhere in the world that I could find. I will place them in the middle of it, miles from everyone. No TV, cameras, cell phones, assistants, Mrs., Mistresses, or Misters. Just them with a card table and chairs. Each would get the 96-side version of rubicks cube and a digital counter showing how much of their money they had left. After the cubes were more than sufficently randomized, the counters would start counting down. Every minute that went by, they lost $20,000, never to return. If and when they finished the puzzle, an audio multiple choice question about their home-state's or native point-of-origin would be played aloud with 6 possible answers, one for each side of the cube. If they get it wrong, they have to randomize the cube again and loste $50,000. If they get it right, they can go home, when they walk to the perimeter of the land plot, their people would talk to my people about his rendevous coordinates. After their congratulatory caning, they'd be allowed to go.
I hate reality TV, and this is why I'm writing about it today. I believe that reality TV has finally hit a point where even the most sedated of us would sit up and say, "Um... This is too dumb to watch."
Sperm Racing. Take a moment for that to sink in.
Yeah, that's right. Someone has made a show about what German has the most fertile sperm in Duetscheland. It was either this of Who could grow fingernails faster in Bangalore.
quote:
Endemol Germany's president, Boris Brandt, denied yesterday that Sperm Race represented a new low point in dumbed-down TV. He claimed that the show had a serious scientific purpose. 'Sperm Race is serious. Fertility is a big thing in Germany,' he told Germany's Bild newspaper.
'About 1.8 million German men are unable to have children because they suffer from poor sperm. And there are disappointed girlfriends and wives, as well as parents who wait in vain for grandchildren.'
Nein, mein fruend(I know no german). Just because fertility is a big issue in Germany and your show is about fertility, does not make it serious. It just means you've found a topic everyone would tune into on a show made with little money. But I'll let the future visuals speak for themselves. People, sitting in bars and homes, gathered around the TV, watching sperm under a microscope crowding around an egg. We've already watched people do yardwork, bitch, moan, and construct rope from their own mucous, I guess it was a matter of time before someone would come up with this. What's next? An african reality show about the search for a blood donor who doesn't have STD's or blood-borne pathogens? Perhaps a show about coal miners and who doesn't have black lung?
I have hope, though. Smarter shows are coming back in regular and recent media. Thanks to the ubiquitous DVD player, cancelled and badly-scheduled shows of promise find new life as a DVD collection and as a more real metric of the audience's response. I'm hoping that such numbers along with the ievitable demise of reality TV will spurn a new generation of smarter shows. But until that time, I'm keeping an ear out for when "Sperm Race" comes to the states, so I know that I can kick my TV to the curb.