America's Love Affair with Reality Television

America, a society of curious voyeurs and drama kings and queens, has found its perfect addiction. Reality television offers viewers a unique combination of lurid deceptions, clumsy sexual encounters, drunken ramblings, and uninhibited outbursts of aggression that keeps them glued to their television screens night after night and week after week.

Rather than living vicariously through the gossiped personal lives of friends and relatives, people can now simply switch on the TV to be first-hand witnesses to the obliteration of relationships, the mutiny that arises when strangers are shipwrecked on exotic islands, and the torment that an "ugly duckling" will endure in order to achieve some standard of beauty as determined by a show's producers.

It's a guilty pleasure than nobody with cable television will have to worry about denying themselves for several years to come. And while so many critics bash reality shows, calling them the lowest possible form of entertainment, reality lovers know that if those critics were just tied to a chair for a few mandated hours of "Survivor" they would be hooked for life too.

It is often said that reality television isn't really "real," and that the producers are constantly coercing the cast members to get involved in precarious situations. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn! So what if the cast is being manipulated to become overly emotional? That's what makes for good television.

Believe me, if all that was being broadcast on reality shows was a couple of sweat pants-laden losers watching late night television, there wouldn't be an audience for the genre - that's just too real! While the situations that the cast members in reality shows endure may be completely contrived, the cast member's reactions to these contrived and manipulated situations are genuine and real - and that's what draws the audience's attention.