Why America Loves Reality TV

3 Pages 709 Words

Why America Loves Reality TV

Even if you don’t watch reality television, it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The salacious Temptation Island was featured on the cover of People Magazine. Big Brother aired five days a week and could be viewed on the web 24 hours a day. And the Survivor final dominated the front of the New York Post after gaining ratings that rivaled those of the Super Bowl. But what makes reality TV shows so popular to everyday average Americans? There are several reasons that reality television has become popular today. The three that I will focus on are the concepts of money, instant fame, and guilty pleasure.

The first reason for reality television being so popular today is money. Today’s shows offer huge sums of money to people who do not necessarily posses the skills that are needed to perform the job to earn such wealth through honest work. Simplified, dumb people get lots of cash. Now, some shows do in fact have, at least at first, a intellectual plot. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, for example, offered up to a million dollars to people answering a set of questions. The questions, however, differ from related shows in that they were usually trivia oriented. Also, the audience was involved, as well as calling a friend and so on, which added to the drama aspect. The lighting, music, and editing all were schemed to produce the maximum possible suspense. The promise of money and idea of someone winning lots of money, or more commonly bidding and losing said money, is what draws millions of viewers.

The second reason I believe reality television has become popular today is that of instant fame. Reality television takes ordinary people, sets them up in extraordinary situations on a world stage with other similarly commonplace individuals, and makes them the focus of a nation’s attention on, for example, an hour every Tuesday. Obviously the majority of the population has no chance of ever being ...