LUDIC LOG

America, never having really gone in too heavily for high culture, pretty much gave up the quest for producing great art sometime around 1956 after a half-hearted and entirely unsuccessful final attempt. Since then, the producers of cultural product have contented themselves with doing what they do best: TV shows.

It's by now a tired and unoriginal observation that television, since attaining the throne of Primary Means of Communication for the Human Race, has had a rather profound effect on our lives and has quite literally changed the way we think. Likewise, people a lot smarter than I am have noted how TV is incredibly important, and that not only what it says, but how it says it, have forever altered how humans view the world. And no one is more aware of this than Americans: while we didn't invent television, we certainly refined it ("perfected" seems an entirely inappropriate word), recognized its tremendous potential, packaged it, and shipped it, and its attendant world-view, all over the planet.

Which is why it's such a pity that the most important thing to happen to television in the last 25 years is not only not an American development, but was lifted wholesale from, of all people, the perennially snobbish and TV-hating Europeans! Poor America. Our storied ingenuity lies in ruins like so many broken-down lunar rovers, and we're beaten at our own game by Limeys and the DUTCH, for God's sake! What happened?

What happened is called, with an extremely disingenous straight face, "reality TV". This catchall phrase has come to mean everything from the Scandinavian knockoffs like "Survivor" and "Big Brother" (and the inevitable fourth-tier clones like "Boot Camp" and "The Mole"), which are the television equivalent of sealing bugs in a jar and shaking it up to watch them fight, to the English knockoffs like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" (an odd question, that) and "The Weakest Link", which, in the old days before marketing took over everything, were called "game shows" instead of "reality-based shows".

It would be pointless and tedious to recap how thoroughly these awful shows have come to dominate the airwaves. In a delightful example of how much art is valued in our brave new world, they were even posited as a possible solution to a recently threatened writers' strike. Reality shows, it was falsely reasoned, do not need writers (in fact, they do; someone has to scrawl the banal horseshit the talking heads who host these shows yammer before commercial breaks. They just don't need GOOD writers), so if those lousy smartasses start asking for what they're worth, we can just fire them and stick a camera in front of a gaggle of jackoffs and broadcast that! In case there was any doubt about my earlier claim that we, as a culture, have pretty much given up on art, here's your proof: we have evinced a willingness to sacrifice even the bottom-of-the-barrel writerly efforts of Hollywood scriptwriters in exchange for watching people even less interesting than we are stammer in front of cameras.

But one aspect of these shows particularly intrigues me: their name. In a triumph of the phenomenon that literary critics call "hyper-reality", these shows -- as artificial, staged, false and remote from daily life as it is possible to be -- are called, of all things, "reality shows". And here, I mean not that they're faked, or staged -- although there's ample evidence that they are staged, or at least "recreated" (one couldn't ask for a better definition of hyper-reality than "Survivor" producer Mark Burnett's claim that reenacting scenes from his show for the cameras "heightens the reality") -- but that they are not reality in the sense that most of us understand the term. In other words, "Survivor" isn't the reality of surviving in the Australian outback; if you don't believe me, ask an aborigine. "Big Brother" isn't much of an evocation of life under constant surveillance when compared to its namesake; one imagines that Orwell's masterpiece of soul-crushing totalitarianism would have been rather less effective had Winston Smith been forced to don a cowboy hat and line-dance for 24 hours in a row, or crawl through the mud carrying a plastic baby doll, before retiring to his Ikea-made Victory Lodgings. And as for the game shows, some people's reality might be winning tremendous wealth for answering incredibly simple questions, but it's not mine, or anyone else's, for that matter.

Whose reality is this, anyway? In what construction of the world do events like this take place, and in what interpretation of the world are they acceptable, compelling, believable? By what magic do we believe that this is documented reality, unscripted and unwritten, springing into the world unplanned and natural? This is the "reality" of television. This is the reality we have inherited, and our unquestioning acceptance of it means that there's more to come. Much, much more. Watch out, folks: this isn't the kind of reality I'd like to live in. But pretty soon, it may be the only one we have.