Reality TV and how it rotted my brain: and other things
Reality TV rotted my brain but I still love it :)
Hello!
This is my first post on Substack and I wonder if anyone will ever read it! If you are reading this, get ready for some real intense, really subversive and groundbreaking content. Get ready to THINK people, to feel like an absolute sexy little intellectual. Cause I’m here to write about the things that MATTER, world changing things, topics that NO one will touch. For example: Politicians? Don’t like em….Yeah…I’m brave. I’m brave and I went there. And I’ll do it again.
Capitalism? Guess what, it’s bad. Okay? I mean it and I’m not taking it back.
So that being said, the topic of this specific stack is gonna be reality TV. Here goes!
Over the Pandemic, I watched a lot of Reality TV. I started off with 90 Day Fiancé, a show about the bliss of love. At first it was sort of beautiful watching people trust their gut and travel across the world to meet a perfect stranger, only then for the stranger to be like I actually don’t like you, and then the person is stuck in like…Malta for a week just crying in a weird hotel room. And of course every couple is different, some had met in person and established a bond and I truly believe their love is genuine (but they’re usually annoying and I skip through their stuff), while some of them are incredibly lonely and following VERY manic untreated impulses. I’m not calling for a mass medication of the 90 day cast, but…definitely try and get a couple therapists on set. Angela from Texas? I don’t trust her for a second. She’s an empty pack of cigarettes away from smacking a producer. Here she is fighting another girl
I like that she’s saying “YOU” and the other girl is saying “Me?” and the guys hand is also there like he’s saying “BOTH OF YOU”, and there’s another hand coming in as if to say “keep the peace!!!” this picture is actually giving me renaissance painting vibes.
But Angela is not an anomaly…a LOT of the people they cast for this show are truly unhinged. And I’m not trying to be judgmental , but I think it’s a pretty general consensus that to be on 90 day, you have to be willing to lose it, which can be kind of liberating. For a lot of them, this is their job. So to be encouraged and even expected to say the craziest shit you can think of on camera? I get it. I support you. I’m a fan. And I’ll keep watching, because I myself am an empty pack of cigarettes away from losing it as well, and if I could get 1300 dollars a week to skype jerk off/scream fight with an unemployed man from Nuuk, Greenland that I met on Facebook I would do it, and I would do it gladly.
The next show I watched was ANTM, or for those of you who don’t know culture, the Tyra Banks super villain show. I started with season six, which was the one where Jade says “This is not America’s Next Top Best Friend” which is an iconic thing to say and influenced literally every other competition show. Here is Jade doing her bizarre commercial:
I think this was the same season where Tyra pretended to faint in front of the cast just to scare them. There’s also a different season where a contestant finds out her best friend died and she can’t go to the funeral, and Tyra THAT DAY makes her get in a dug out grave for a photoshoot. She has darkened models skin, she has screamed into their faces, made them cry, made them hang upside down for hours, poured maple syrup in their eyes, the list goes on. Tyra loved pulling sadistic little pranks on them, pouring paint or honey on them, giving them horrible outfits and fucking up their hair just like that demented little kid from Toy Story .
But they loved her, to an undying degree, a part of the show I don’t think I could ever understand. No matter what fucked up thing Tyra did to these poor girls, they worshipped the ground she walked on. Tyra Banks had such a biblical power over these girls, it’s no wonder things got out of hand. But she’s a martyr of reality TV, she did this crazy shit 10-15 years ago, and now people are taking to twitter to condemn Miss Banks for all her atrocities, branding her a pop culture war criminal. And I don’t want to defend Tyra, I don’t think anyone should, but she did start in the early days of Reality TV, an era with practically no rules. There were shows like Rock of Love Bus where 12 girls are stuck on a bus going 70 MPH with nothing but alcohol for like 8 hours at a time. Or even the Swan where girls get plastic surgery to turn “From an Ugly Duckling to a Beautiful Swan” And then they get paraded around a mansion while a bunch of guys standing around in suits say “Nice”. ANTM at the very least like…wasn’t the most degrading thing on TV at the time, but we as a country should still lock Tyra up like one of the Titans from Greek mythology. Keep her in a deep pit, and then one day, according to legend, thousands of years into the future, Tyra will emerge stronger than ever, ready to brutalize the world once more.
This pic is Tyra when she revamps ANTM
Okay the last show I swear I’ll talk about is Real Housewives. Now I’ve only seen two of the cities, New York and Beverley Hills and I saw the first season of New Jersey but I wasn’t paying attention so actually I didn’t see it. Oh I also have seen the first season of Salt Lake City and I WAS paying attention and it was really bizarre. Felt like…I don’t want to say Lynchian cause now everything is “Lynchian” but that season of housewives doesn’t really feel like ~Of this world~. So I’ll start with sort of a general overlying housewives concept which is MONEY. At the beginning it was kind of fun getting to know these women because they are so removed from the life I know. These are ladies who would probably come to a restaurant I was serving at and then tell me the glasses are dirty and then I’d bring them different glasses and they’d say “These ones are dirty too” and I’d be like…”Sorry” but not get them new glasses and instead just kind of stand there and then it would be awkward and they’d tip me $15 on a $300 bill. Getting immersed via TV into this high class society was a gorgeous little thrill, until I quickly realized it’s all a trick. They’re trying to get us to like them so that come the revolution we spare their asses! Eat the rich doesn’t exclude the housewives, they’re actually doing some of the most fucked up shit of any rich people. The Erika Girardi Scandal?? Come on people!!! Erika is my crab Rangoon appetizer and Ramona is like the salty fish main course, doesn’t taste great, but I won’t complain to the chef. The only housewife that should be spared in the revolution is Kim Richards because honestly ever since she got out of rehab for the third time and then stole a cart full of stuff from Target, I think she’s more like us than them. Kim is struggling and her kids are mean to her and she lives in a weird duplex and she dated this guy that looked EXACTLY like a troll so we have to be nice to her, okay?
Love this queen look at how her eye is falling off like that, it’s the trauma I really hope she’s okay.
It’s so easy to get hypnotized by these charming ladies, and we as viewers are constantly empathizing with them, because we see them display incredible emotional range. When a housewife is crying, I want to hold them, when a favorite housewife is yelling at one I don’t like, I’m butt naked at 2 PM in my living room screaming and pointing at the TV. When Lisa Rinna says something insane and then goes “I’m just being honest" I am willing to die for her. But that isn’t how it should be, because Lisa Rinna WOULD let me die. She’d actually probably kill me and steal my lips. None of these women care about any of us. They’d burn us all for more diamonds and a new line of Tequila. “Dorinda presents: Tequila made from ashes of the poor!”
These women have been SO mean to me at work before, I watch these women on TV be horrible to servers and doormen, bartenders and retail people. These are not good people, in fact many of them are objectively bad!! Think of the worst thing you can, and I’m sure one of the housewives is involved somehow. Teddi Mellencamp was starving people at her gym, and there’s no way LVP is THAT rich from restaurants, do I smell an arms deal? I am once again bringing Kim Richards back into the conversation cause I don’t think she’s done wrong in fact she has been hurt FAR too much. Once, Kim heard her fiancé get murdered on the phone while she was talking to him!! Talk about a HARD LIFE. If anyone knows where she is or if she’s okay, please inform me. I worry.
I need to work on prioritizing my empathy because I genuinely do like tuning into their wealthy little soap opera, but I can’t keep feeling comradery for these women, and that’s a little scary to be manipulated like that. They will never be my friends, they don’t care about me, and that’s okay! Detaching myself from this bond I’ve forged with these women might free up some emotional space for, oh I don’t know Love Island maybe? I still have to work through most of that one. I just don’t think it’s healthy to view this show as a goal or to want to be friends with them, it’s not anything we should be working towards. That being said though, It is groundbreaking to have interpersonal dynamics of middle aged women being social like that on TV. How cool is that? In most other mediums, middle aged women are just like pushed aside or shit on, but here they are celebrated and made into legends. That genuinely is beautiful. It also makes me think maybe the problem I have with the show has nothing to do with these individual women, but the rich population in general. Every year I get older, the more I realize that rich people are usually to blame for most of the horrors of life. Isn’t that funny? Such a small select group of people collectively has the power to make life a little nicer for everyone else, and instead they refuse and they go to Dubai and stay in a Hilton with 35k a night rooms and fight on a yacht because they had a miscommunication three months ago. Such is life!!
Oh but the reason why Salt Lake City is so interesting to me is because of the religious aspect! I think it’s so fascinating to have a religiously diverse cast. Housewives needs to work on Diversity as it is, but Salt Lake City is definitely going in the right direction. Also I don’t trust Andy Cohen I feel like he eats people? Or he wants to maybe? Anyways thanks for reading I didn’t proofread literally at all so if you got through this mess, I’m proud of you and I love you and I still love reality TV and I will still be watching it.
-Arie