Everything Bad Is Good for You (17 page)

In November 1997, NBC aired an episode of
Seinfeld
called “The Betrayal,” in which the scenes were presented in reverse chronological order. If the
Seinfeld
formula often involved setups followed by punch lines that arrived years later, “The Betrayal” took a more radical approach: punch lines that arrived
before
their setups. You'd see Kramer begging Newman to protect him from a character called “FDR,” and only find out why ten minutes later, when you're shown an “earlier” scene where FDR gives Kramer the evil eye at a birthday party. The title of the episode (and the name of one of the characters) was a not-so-subtle nod to the Harold Pinter play
Betrayal
, which told the story of a love triangle as a reverse chronology. But comedies are different from dramas in their relationship to time: a dramatic event with no context is a mystery—the withheld information can heighten the drama. But a punch line with no context is not a joke. Nearly unwatchable the first time around, “The Betrayal” became coherent only on a second viewing—and it took three solid passes before the jokes started to work. You'd see the punch line delivered onscreen, and you'd fill in the details of the setup on your own.

“The Betrayal” was a watershed in television programming, assembling all the elements of modern TV complexity in one thirty-minute sitcom. The narrative wove together seven distinct threads, withheld crucial information in almost every sequence, and planted jokes that had multiple layers of meaning. As the title implied, these were storytelling devices that you would have found only in avant-garde narrative thirty or forty years ago: in Pinter, or Alain Robbe-Grillet, or Godard. You might have been able to fill a small theater in Greenwich Village with an audience willing to parse all that complexity in 1960, but only if the
Times
had given the play a good review that week. Forty years later, NBC puts the same twisted narrative structure on prime-time television, and 15 million people lap it up.

A few popular sitcoms have done well with the traditional living room banter of yesteryear:
Everybody Loves Raymond
comes to mind. But most comedies that have managed to achieve both critical and commercial success—
Scrubs, The Office, South Park, Will & Grace, Curb Your Enthusiasm
—have almost without exception taken their structural cues from
The Simpsons
instead of
Three's Company
: creating humor with a half-life longer than fifteen seconds, drawing on intricate plotlines and obscure references. But the sitcom genre as a whole has wilted in the past few years, as television execs turned their focus to the new—and oft-abused—ratings champ: reality programming.

 

S
KEPTICS MIGHT ARGUE
that I have stacked the deck here by focusing on relatively highbrow titles like
The Simpsons
or
The West Wing,
when in fact the most significant change in the last five years of narrative entertainment has nothing to do with complex dramas or self-referential sitcoms. Does the contemporary pop cultural landscape look quite as promising if the representative TV show is
Joe Millionaire
instead of
The West Wing
?

I think it does, but to answer that question properly, you have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early seventies—invoking shows like
Mary Tyler Moore
and
All in the Family
—they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade. If you're going to look at pop culture trends, you have to compare apples to apples, or in this case, lemons to lemons. If
Joe Millionaire
is a dreadful show that has nonetheless snookered a mass audience into watching it, then you have to compare it to shows of comparable quality and audience reach from thirty years ago for the trends to be meaningful. The relevant comparison is not between
Joe Millionaire
and
M*A*S*H
; it's between
Joe Millionaire
and
The Price Is Right,
or between
Survivor
and
The Love Boat.

What you see when you make these head-to-head comparisons is that a rising tide of complexity has been lifting programming both at the bottom of the quality spectrum and at the top.
The Sopranos
is several times more demanding of its audiences than
Hill Street
was, and
Joe Millionaire
has made comparable advances over
Battle of the Network Stars.
This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve theory: even the crap has improved.

How might those improvements be measured? To take stock of this emerging genre, once again we have to paint our portrait of the rhinoceros carefully, to capture why people really get hooked on these shows. Because I think the appeal is often misunderstood. The conventional wisdom is that audiences flock to reality programming because they enjoy the prurient sight of other people being humiliated on national TV. This indeed may be true for gross-out shows like
Fear Factor,
where contestants lock themselves into vaults with spiders or consume rancid food for their fifteen minutes of fame. But for the most successful reality shows—
Survivor
or
The Apprentice
—the appeal is more sophisticated. That sophistication has been difficult to see, because reality programming, too, has suffered from our tendency to see emerging genres as “pseudo” versions of earlier genres, as McLuhan diagnosed. When reality programming first burst on the scene, it was traditionally compared with the antecedent form of the documentary film. Naturally, when you compare
Survivor
with
Shoah, Survivor
comes up short. But reality shows do not represent reality the way documentaries represent reality.
Survivor
's relationship to reality is much closer to the relationship between professional sports and reality: highly contrived, rule-governed environments where (mostly) unscripted events play out.

Thinking of reality shows in the context of games gives us useful insight into the merits of the genre, as opposed to the false comparisons to Barbara Koppel films and
Capturing the Friedmans.
Perhaps the most important thing that should be said about reality programming is that the format is reliably structured like a video game. Reality television provides the ultimate testimony to the cultural dominance of games in this moment of pop culture history. Early television took its cues from the stage: three-act dramas, or vaudeville-like acts with rotating skits and musical numbers. In the Nintendo age, we expect our televised entertainment to take a new form: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play. On a show like
Survivor
or
The Apprentice,
the participants—and the audience—know the general objective of the series, but each episode involves new challenges that haven't been ordained in advance. The final round of season one of
The Apprentice,
for instance, threw a monkeywrench into the strategy that had governed the play up until that point, when Trump announced that the two remaining apprentices would have to assemble and manage a team of subordinates who had already been fired in earlier episodes of the show. All of a sudden the overarching objective of the game—do anything to avoid being fired—presented a potential conflict to the remaining two contenders: the structure of the final round favored the survivor who had maintained the best relationships with his comrades. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to have clawed your way to the top; you had to have made friends while clawing.

The rules and conventions of the reality genre are in flux, and that unpredictability is part of the allure. This is one way in which reality shows differ dramatically from their game show ancestors. When new contestants walked onstage for
The Price Is Right
or
Wheel of Fortune,
no ambiguity existed about the rules of engagement; everyone knew how the game was played—the only open question was who would be the winner, and what fabulous prizes they'd take home. In reality TV, the revealing of the game's rules is part of the drama, a deliberate ambiguity that is celebrated and embraced by the audience. The original
Joe Millionaire
put a fiendish spin on this by undermining the most fundamental convention of all—that the show's creators don't openly lie to the contestants about the prizes—by inducing a construction worker to pose as a man of means while fifteen women competed for his attention.

Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that's been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other human beings humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other human beings in a complex, high-stakes environment where no established strategies exist, and watching them find their bearings. That's why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode: Why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?

Some of that challenge comes from an ever-changing system of rules, but it also comes from the rich social geography that all reality programming explores. In this one respect, the reality shows exceed the cognitive demands of the video games, because the games invariably whittle away at the branches of social contact. In the gameworld, you're dealing with real people through the mediating channels of 3D graphics and text chat; reality shows drop flesh-and-blood people into the same shared space for months at a time, often limiting their contact with the outside world. Reality program participants are forced to engage face-to-face with their comrades, and that engagement invariably taps their social intelligence in ways that video games can only dream of. And that social chess becomes part of the audience's experience as well. This, of course, was the appeal of that pioneering reality show, MTV's
The Real World,
which didn't need contests and fabulous prizes to lure its viewers; it just needed a group of people thrust together in a new space and forced to interact with one another.

The role of audience participation is one of those properties that often ends up neglected when the critics assess these shows. If you take reality programming to be one long extended exercise in public humiliation, then the internal monologue of most viewers would sound something like this: “Look at this poor fool—what a jackass!” Instead, I suspect those inner monologues are more likely to project the viewer into the show's world; they're participatory, if only hypothetically so: “If I were choosing who to kick off the island, I'd have to go with Richard.” You assess the social geography and the current state of the rules, and you imagine how you would have played it, had you made it through the casting call. The pleasure and attraction of that kind of involvement differ from the narrative pleasure of the sitcom: the appeal of
Happy Days
doesn't come from imagining how you might have improved on the pep talk that Fonzie gives Richie over lunch at Al's. But in the world of reality programming, that projection is a defining part of the audience's engagement with the show.

Old-style game show viewers also like to imagine themselves as participants; people have been shouting out the answers in their living rooms since the days of
21.
(Reality programming embraces and extends the logic of game shows, just as shows like
The Sopranos
and
Six Feet Under
expand on the template originally created by the soap opera.) But the rules and the “right answers” have increased in complexity since Herbert Stempel took his famous dive. “Playing” a reality show requires you to both adapt to an ever-changing rulebook, and scheme your way through a minefield of personal relationships. To succeed in a show like
The Apprentice
or
Survivor,
you need social intelligence, not just a mastery of trivia. When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us—the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression—scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly, and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the characters, but those connections don't have the same participatory effect, because traditional narratives aren't explicitly about
strategy.
The phrase “Monday-morning quarterbacking” was coined to describe the engaged feeling spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We absorb stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around
social
dexterity rather than the physical kind.