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Viewers are real freaks
of ‘reality’ showsHolding people up to public ridicule and humiliation has always been a mainstay of television entertainment, in the same way that carnival freak shows were considered entertainment in pre-televison days.
It's an easy and cheap formula for popular and financial success: Put people on display who are grotesque so viewers can laugh at them and feel better about themselves. It's a lot easier to draw a loud, disparaging laugh out of some fool then to create art that causes an audience to engage in actual thought and introspection.
I'm old enough to remember a golden moment in television history when viewers were treated to an uplifting little show called "Queen for a Day." I'm being facetious when I say "uplifting," because you would be hard-put to come up with a more humiliating, depressing and brutally perverted program, although, as we will see, it's not impossible.
On "Queen for a Day" three women would battle it out to convince the audience that their life was the most pathetic. These poor women would tearfully pour out their wretched tales of poverty, loneliness, spouse abuse and divorce. The "winner" would be draped with a ratty-looking "queen's cape" and crowned and given a washing machine.
As queasy as that scene might make you, there is a direct entertainment genetic link that runs from the "bearded lady" at the early freak shows to the pathetic "Queen for a Day" to the "Anna Nicole Smith Show" and other "reality" shows depicting dysfunctional families like the "Osbournes."
Watching the wretched, drugged and blimped out Anna Nicole Smith lurch around her house surrounded by a cadre of blood-sucking "handlers" causes the same retch in the throat that "Queen for a Day" did. Except Anna is "Queen for a Season," and her "prize" is the pathological self-delusion that people are laughing with her, not at her.
NOW CBS plans to air a show about a bunch of hicks from the sticks who have not "been exposed to big-city life." It's supposed to be a real-life version of the old "Beverly Hillbillies" show. But it's actually just another chance for clueless freaks to demean themselves for the pleasure of viewers.
The reason the original "Beverly Hillbillies" was popular was because the sitcom family members carried themselves with a certain dignity; the ultimate joke always seemed to be on the conniving banker Drysdale and other big-city "sophisticates." Don't look for similar shades of humanity in the new show. These real hillbillies are offered up merely for voyeuristic slaughter.
It's probably no accident that the "Hicks for the Day" will be Caucasian, in the tradition of the "Queens," the Osbournes and Anna Nicole Smith. To subject any other racial group to such ridicule would not be tolerated. That alone should give pause to any viewers with a heart or soul.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com