Reality and Likeability

One common critique of reality TV is that it isn’t “real”: although it purports to be about real people’s lives, it’s actually highly manufactured and engineered to generate distinct characters and narrative structure.  Since actual humans are generally more complex than distinct characters, and actual life is generally a good deal more meandering than a television audience will tolerate, the result of this manufacturing and engineering bears little resemblance to “reality.” I don’t particularly share that objection—I’d much rather watch something designed to entertain than something genuine and boring.  But a surprisingly large number of reality shows mistake “designed to entertain” for “focusing on unlikeable people.”  And this is truly mystifying to me.  These shows have an audience, so perhaps I’m just not the target market.  But that makes me wonder:  what is it in the zeitgeist that makes people want to watch shows about unlikeable people?

When I say “unlikeable,” I’m not talking about people who do bad things or people who make bad choices.  I understand why those people are interesting.  There are a lot of really wonderful shows out there about criminals and screw-ups.  Mostly, I’m referring to narcissists—people who are so self-absorbed and insecure that they wouldn’t know “well-meaning” if it smiled and waved at them.  There are a surprising (to me, at least) number of shows about these people, and about how they have no sense of how their actions affect the people around them.  I suppose there is some amusement value to laughing at the un-self-aware and remarking on their ability to delude themselves.  I'm not too proud to admit I find that funny too.  But to style these people as heroes?  It’s never quite made sense to me. 

What’s even stranger to me is how many shows seem to mistake unlikeability for realness.  It's not just reality shows, although many of them are staged and edited to highlight these characters.  (Without them, we certainly wouldn’t have “The Bad Girls Club” and it’s ilk.  We probably wouldn’t have the Spencer & Heidi shows, or even the Kardashians.  Heck, we’d barely have “America’s Next Top Model,” which is at least supposed to be about competent people doing what they do well.)  I don’t mean to say that the real world doesn’t have loathsome people in it.  I’m sure everyone has known a deluded narcissist or two.  I certainly have.  But I, for one, want to get away from those people when I plunk down in front of the telee.  I don’t want to see more of them.   Or perhaps I do--but if I do, I at least want to see something that has some critical distance from them.  

It’s not that I want everyone on television to be likeable.  I just want not to have to applaud or admire people for that unlikeability.  And that goes for fiction as well as “reality.”

To wit:

Ja’mie: Private School Girl (HBO, Australian, new to US.  Sitcom/mockumentary)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Mockumentary about the ringleader of a bunch of rich mean girls who attend a private girls’ school in Sydney.

Promise:  I actually couldn’t find anything redeeming about this show, about a bunch of mean, narcissistic, self-satisfied, classist, racist, sizeist (etc.) girls.  The show and its main character are the brainchild of Chris Lilley, a (male) Australian comedian who plays the main character (in drag).  It is, apparently, the third series about its main character, although I wasn’t familiar with the forst three.  There’s virtually no plot—it just follows the girls through their jargon-filled, disrespectful, self-congratulatory day.  I’m surprised it’s even possible, but it’s true:  these characters are more offensive than those on reality shows about offensive people.  I presume it’s supposed to be a parody of those shows, satirizing the extreme version of privilege it portrays.  But just because something is satire doesn’t make it watchable.  I don’t think I’ve ever disliked a show this much.

Verdict:  I want that half-hour back.

Adam Devine’s House Party (Comedy Central, new.  Stand-up comedy.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  Standup comedy with a house party framing mechanism.

Promise:  I love good stand-up, and Devine is a funny guy who often generates humor through self-humiliation.  This show is a pretty extreme version of that:  the premise, as he describes it, is that Comedy Central gave him a bunch of money to make a standup comedy series, and he blew all the money on an enormous house party.  So the show is clips from the party, alternating with standup sets presented on an outdoor stage by comics who are (we are meant to assume) Devine’s friends.  The party bits are amusing, but smack of class-clown desperation.  The comics’ sets, at least in the pilot, trend toward crude or sexual humor.  It’s not bad, but not quite my cup of tea.  I think—and perhaps I shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit this, although I am—I prefer my standup to have its brows just a tiny bit higher than this.  I’m not asking for erudition…but it doesn’t seem like that much to ask for more than straight men making jokes about gay stereotypes.  Of course, the show’s enjoyability will depend heavily on each comic’s set—but based on their choices in the pilot, at least, they may be intentionally choosing comics with frat-boy sensibilities.

Verdict: I think I’m not the target audience.

Naked Vegas (SyFy, new. Documentary.)

Watched: First few episodes

Premise: Although the show is advertised in conjunction with Face Off, it’s really much more in line with other documentaries like LA Ink or Ace of Cakes.  The show focuses on a body painting company (called “Naked Vegas” that paints clients for shows and special occasions.  It highlights the painters’ artistry, business challenges, personalities, and interactions with clients.  It’s a common format now.  These sorts of documentaries are interesting inasmuch as they introduce the viewer to the intricacies and travails of industries that may be new or out of the mainstream.  Often the shows are populated by unusual or outsized characters.  Here, the characters aren’t particularly outlandish (they are all excellent artists, and quirky people, but nothing too out-there), but their artistry is impressive, and there’s a lot to be said for watching people be competent.  But ultimately, the show tries a bit too hard to manufacture drama, which means we get to spend extra time on the hard-to-handle elements of the characters, and spend more time than I’d prefer on little disagreements among the artists.  What I really want to see is the before and after pictures, punctuated by demonstrations of their skillful technique. I guess what I’m saying is that I’d rather this were done in the style of a cooking show than a documentary.  And it’s not really fair to ask a show to be a different genre entirely.

Verdict:  I like the competence element, but when I need room on the DVR, this gets deleted early.

Million Dollar Shoppers (Lifetime, new.  Documentary.)

Watched: Episode 2

Premise:  I like shopping more than most, but “personal shopper” sounds like a very hard job.  It’s nice, I’m sure, to have relatively unlimited budgets and the opportunity to hunt for cool items for a living. But shopping is also a very personal endeavor—of any 100 items in the store, I’ll only expect to like a handful, and I have pretty arbitrary reasons for choosing that handful.  And of that handful, it’s a toss-up whether any will fit and look like I expect them to.  With that in mind, the personal shopper, who is in essence creating the dressing room in someone’s home or office, has an almost impossible task:  find a selection of things the client will like and that will fit the client.  This show demonstrates how difficult that task is, especially for demanding, presumptuous, or otherwise insufferable clients.  The shoppers are all oddballs in one way or another (undoubtedly, handpicked for tv), and the customers are portrayed as mostly sort of awful (or at least somewhat difficult) people, and the combination makes for an uncomfortable mélange of hard-to-watch characters.  It’s also a bit hard to swallow the unexamined privilege of the show’s characters:  I have no objection to the idea of someone who has more money than time, and therefore employs someone to do something time-saving.  But I do object to that person failing to recognize the privilege that allows them to do that, or treating their employee with disrespect. These characters do—and while that can be fun to watch in a “what’s this world come to” kind of way, it’s also a bit angering.  I expect the show is well-suited to people who enjoyed The Hills, or whatever that show was about Kelly Cutrone.  But it’s not for me.

Verdict: It’s not boring, but it’s not really a place I want to spend time, either.

Getting On (HBO, new.  Sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:   The daily travails of the extended-care wing of a hospital.

Promise:  This show’s adapted from the British series of the same name, and it shows.  It embodies a particular sort of droll satire-verité that the British do exceedingly well, and Americans often fumble at.  I’m thinking here of The Office and Twenty Twelve, but there are others as well.  They thrive on bureaucracy and unempathetic characters, and wallow in missed connections and awkward silences. I haven’t seen the British version of Getting On, but it appears that the American version is very similar to it:  it takes place in the extended care wing of a hospital, and focuses on the mostly competent, but very ill-guided, doctors and nurses who oversee these aging, infirm patients.  The result is an awkward slow-motion circus of poor communication and worse choices.  A doctor cares more about her study of fecal matter than about the patients who produce it; a nurse who lacks common sense; the one reasonable person in the room.  I don’t love the show.  It’s paced very slowly.  I’m sure this is intentional—it highlights the stultifying nature of its subject—but that can be hard to watch.  Many of the humor is the sort that only becomes funny through repetition, which means it’s pretty slow to reach the humor.  Likewise, the small ensemble cast highlights the loneliness of the work, but limits the comedic variety.  I could see this show reaching the sort of satirical brilliance.  It’ll require a faster pace, more physical humor, and more characters.  Fortunately, the preview implies that all three of these things are on the way.  How far can it go?  Hard to say.  Lambasting bureaucratic incompetence is funny when the stakes are (per Twenty Twelve) public embarrassment as the host city for the Olympics.  But perhaps it’s irretrievably sad when the stakes are the lives of elderly patients and their families. 

But here’s where today’s moral comes in:  in stark contrast to the shows above, these characters are mostly well-meaning, if short-sighted, and that goes a long way toward making the show watchable.  It’s still not easy to watch:  These people make terrible choices for terrible reasons, with terrible results.  Like a lot of satire, one must pierce through the sadness to find the humor, and the sadness here is so stiflingly poignant that it’s hard to see through.  But they aren’t all selfish, and for the most part they don’t mean to hurt anyone.  They’re just fumbling around in a world that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and that makes them more “real” than a heck of a lot of reality characters.

Verdict:  I’ll give it a couple of tries.

On the DVR  (or at least un-reviewed):  Lucky 7 (canceled); Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, The Paradise, Ground Floor, and Atlantis.