Reality TV: Guilty Pleasure or Window to Our Souls? By Ray Waddle
A United Methodist News Service and UMC.org feature  It’s been called the crack cocaine of television, cheap to produce and addictive to watch. Reality TV – is it really a bad thing?
The new TV season this fall will feature another wave of new reality shows. Already, prime time is buzzing with a dozen programs loosely termed “reality TV,” a tag that describes unscripted situations involving non-actors in predicaments that require charm or shrewdness to succeed, usually for love or money. The success of Survivor, Real World, Joe Millionaire and others has made reality TV a defining media genre of the 21st century. For better or worse, it’s here to stay. Whether they tune in or not, people of faith ought to pay attention to what the church might learn from it all, according to observers who monitor the frontier between pop culture and spiritual life. “Yes, they’re a guilty pleasure,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at United Methodist-related Syracuse (N.Y.) University. “Clearly, a lot of these programs reflect the less noble aspects of the human spirit. Yet there are things to be learned about human nature and the human spirit on some of these shows.” Take Temptation Island, for instance – the reality show on which committed couples test their relationships by meeting good-looking unattached singles. It sounds like a bad idea, Thompson says, yet the show turns out to be a modern version of an ancient moral tale, he says.  “If you sit down and watch, you see it’s a retelling of themes from Genesis or Faust: If you mess around with temptation, it’s a bad thing. In the end, it’s a very traditional message,” he says.
Detractors are not hard to find. Even some Hollywood industry insiders have lashed out against reality TV, calling it shameless, undignified, an insult to viewer intelligence even as it rakes in massive ratings and profits for the networks. Reality TV, critics say, reinforces gender stereotypes, glorifies cutthroat behavior and deceives viewers into thinking these highly edited shows are raw, unfiltered reality. “It’s hard to get honest-to-goodness real human interaction when you know the cameras are rolling,” says Ed Vitagliano of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. “It’s a modern-day freak show,” he says. “Viewers sit back and watch people make fools of themselves. We all like to rubberneck at the scene of an accident. That’s what these shows are like. But to waste our time this way shows just how bored we really are. It’s awful to see how much time is being vacuumed out of our lives.”  One culture watcher says the religious critics should try to understand reality TV’s clues to spiritual life today, instead of making easy condemnations.
“Reality TV is reinventing TV,” says the Rev. Leonard Sweet, a United Methodist author and futurist. “It’s a reflection of a larger cultural shift taking place. It’s relationship TV. This is a relationship culture, an interactive culture. People want to learn how to do relationships, and the pathetic thing is the churches aren’t teaching them, so they turn to TV.” Sweet says the culture is moving in what he calls an “EPIC” direction, referring to the need for experience, participation, image-richness and connection. Increasingly, people expect interactivity at work and play, he says. Reality TV has parallels with the Christian message, he says. The old consumer model shaped the gospel message into a series of propositions to be swallowed, not experienced, just as the old TV model shaped its programming.  “The church has made truth into a proposition and not a relationship,” Sweet says. “The modern world made Jesus the answer, a solution. No, he is the truth, the way and the life, a mystery to be lived. What people want is not so much to ‘believe’ in God but to experience God. The church has to come to terms with this.”
Another media watcher says church groups might use the reality trend on TV to launch a discussion about the real world of community ills and solutions. “I’d use reality TV as a jumping-off point to ask what’s real in our neighborhood, what’s real in our lives and our society,” says Elizabeth Thoman, head of the Center for Media Literacy, based in Los Angeles. Says Thoman: “You can condemn it or empower people to understand it.” Waddle, former religion editor at The Tennessean newspaper, is a writer and columnist in Nashville. He is the author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time, which will be published by Upper Room Books at the end of this year.
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