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The cable company recently upgraded the menu service for my digital cable package with all kinds of new features intended to make my experience with the TV more user friendly. For the most part, they succeeded. There are all kinds of new little gems that pop up on my screen with a push of the overly-buttonized remote control.

One of these new features is a much more detailed description of what it is I’m watching (or potentially watching when I’m browsing the menu). It’s got release dates, who’s in it, what it’s about, how many stars it got, and the genre the TV gods believe it to belong to. It was this new feature that allowed me to make a startling discovery. As I was flipping through the channels tonight, I noticed many of the traditional genres of film represented: comedy… drama… horror… sci-fi. But there was a new one. A genre I hadn’t realized had become official, but should have figured on none the less: reality.

Just like coming to the realization that it’s not a dream, and you actually are standing in front of your math class naked, I discovered that reality television has officially taken over as the dominant form of entertainment on my cable box.

I suppose we have the Real World to thank for this. Before Survivor… before Big Brother… before that awful show with the Hilton twit… the Real World was entertaining masses of young and old alike with it’s unscripted “real” look at strangers forced to live together “in a house”. Of course, the irony of it all is that the whole idea behind the Real World was so far from reality that no one seemed to notice. A bunch of strangers moving in together just for kicks and grins? Not something that I’m betting happened across the globe in mass. But MTV was able to make us all believe that we were watching real life at play with their show. And for the most part, it worked. Hell… I watched it… I won’t lie.

But the networks have taken the premise of the Real World and run. No… they’re not just running. They’ve outfitted F-14 fighter jets with crop dusting tanks and flown non-stop sorties over the American public, dumping countless tons of “real” on us. So much, in fact, that simply putting the word “reality” in the description of a television show almost guarantees an audience, regardless of what is actually being portrayed.

Every other show I flipped to had ‘reality’ in parenthesis after it. Even CMT had one. Get this… apparently they take folks from the city and drop them off in the country to see which ones can win over the hearts of the simple farm folk. Touching. Give me one station that doesn’t have a show like this? Maybe the Discovery Channel (or one of it’s sister channels). But other than that… name one. Really… if you know of any, please let me know so I can tune in.

Not one of these so called “reality” shows actually has any reality to it. Take Survivor, probably the most-watched of the reality programs. A bunch of strangers (of course) dropped off in some remote part of the world… forced to live off the land… and jump through hoops for the affection of one another and the viewing public. It’s Little House on the Prairie meets the dog show. What’s even better is the fact that people not only enjoy all of the plotting and back-stabbing… they expect it. They crave it. It’s what makes the show worth watching. Something that would otherwise be considered a bad trait is suddenly what makes people tune in. Me… I’m still waiting for the reality to kick in. Do you want to know what would happen if all of those people really found themselves in the middle of no where without CBS all around to take care of them? They’d die. They’d starve… they’d catch disease… they’d eat each other… and they’d die. Now that’s real. Are you taking notes, CBS?

Or what about the switching spouses show (whatever it’s called)? Not only is it a far, far cry from reality… but technically speaking, it’s illegal! If you’re married to someone, you can’t suddenly decide to switch spouses and be married to someone else on a whim. Even better, it flies in the face of everything that is true to human nature. As un-PC as it is to say, there’s a reason these people have so much conflict when they’re thrown together on the show: they come from different sides of the tracks. The TV execs know this, of course. But they’re sneaky in the way they publicize it. They’ll tell you the people come from “different backgrounds” when what they should be saying is “they come from different walks of life, and in the real world, would never be caught dead in the graces of one another”. There’s always a family of well-to-do yuppies switching with a family of po’ folks who run a farm or live in a trailer. In reality, the well offs would look down their noses at the po’s, who would in turn avoid the well offs out of bitter jealousy and envy. The po’ wife almost always cries and the well off wife almost always ends up looking like a snobby bitch (which she usually really is). The fact that it’s so predictable is the only part of it that has even the slightest connection with reality.

But no matter how many times the survivors back stab one another and no matter how many times the po’ wife cries, millions of people watch with stitched-opened eyes to revel in another person’s misery. They just can’t get enough of the tears and the pain. Look at Fear Factor. Maybe not technically “reality tv”… but it’s in the same camp. How many times can you tell people to eat rotten pig balls that were shoved up the butt of a dead camel and call it entertaining? And how many times can you watch someone throw them up before it gets to be too much? No one cares what they have to eat or what they have to do… so long as it’s painful and miserable for them… that’s all that matters. We want them to cry and puke and break bones and fall on their faces and pass out from malnutrition. Ratings would soar if someone died on national television. Seriously… you know they would. “Must See TV” at it’s best. Everyone would want to tune in for the episode when Holly Hoop-jumper, mother of two, falls off a cliff and dies trying to be the first person to grab a red rubber ball and hold it between her knees while repelling off the side of a gorge.

Broken down to it’s finer bits, the obsession with reality tv is quite simple: it’s barbarianism, plain and simple. The pain, misery, and torment of others for personal satisfaction. We of modern times love to wallow in how far we’ve come from our dicey pasts. But have we really? In days long past, they had a live version of reality tv. It was called the stadium and the actors were called gladiators (at least in one part of the world). They massacred each other in the most horrific of ways and the people loved it. Even for societies as civilized as those supposedly were, the fact that they loved such things says that we’ve not come quite as far as we think we have. Modern people love to think that they value human life more than the people who came before them. But they don’t. We may place a greater value on the biological functions of the human creature, but we do not value the dignity, the character, or the soul of our fellow people any more than the savages of our ancestry valued those of their livestock.

Laws and dogma… the only things that have changed.