Reality based TV shows just how bored we as a society are. There’s nothing “real” about any of these shows. Reality and TV are mutually exclusive.

The whole premise of Survivor is flawed. What’s the big prize? A million bucks. Same thing as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. If having the opportunity to win a million bucks how would you prefer to get it, suffering a few bad jokes from Regis and answering fifteen questions correctly, or schlumping canoes around the Outback, fighting off vermin, and the Machiavellian machinations of a wannabe-actress bartending stranger? Seems like a no-brainer.

It’s the same thing though. It’s a game show. There’s nothing real about it. It’s not about escaping dire circumstances with the most valuable of prizes -- your life -- it’s about cross and double-cross in contrived isolation with fourteen other greedy strangers to see who can leave with all the little pieces of paper.

The show is an affront to true Survivors everywhere. There’s no sacrifice, ingenuity, moral fortitude, or personal revelation involved. Mostly it’s an exhibition of everything that’s wrong with society today, making for good theatre but depressing reality.

We spent three hundred years carving out the wilderness, so we can come home, eat our tv dinners and watch some psycho sloppily butcher a tame pig, smear himself in its blood, and proclaim he feels better about his position now that he made this kill. Certainly ironic, realistic? Please. Wonder if pyscho butcher Mikey wants the vision of him, smeared in blood, gleefully holding a bloodied knife, to be the defining moment of his life?

What do we want to watch reality based shows for anyway? Most of life is boring, filled with tedious tasks, completion of which is necessary to make it from one day to the next. Problem with this show is the tedious daily tasks are from three hundred years ago. Who’s the technical consultant Daniel Boone?

A real reality based Survivor series for these first days of the 21st century would be to put fifteen people in a den and make them watch fifteen consecutive hours of Oprah featuring Doctor Bob -- or whatever the quacks name is who constantly says, “just get over it” -- without having to scream into their hands, gnash their teeth and hurl into the wastebasket. The winner would get a chip blocking all Harpo Productions from their tvs in perpetuity.

Another good one would be Tailgate at the Tollgate 2002. Give a guy an old Pinto, blowing smoke out the back end, and send him up the on ramp 500 feet from a tollbooth on the interstate at fifteen miles an hour, cutting across five lanes of traffic to the IPASS lane. If he makes it through the tollbooth and to the first exit afterward, cutting back across three lanes of traffic this time, still at his steady fifteen miles an hour, without being rammed into the concrete median by any of the myriad SUVs on the road, he’d win an oil change and emissions exemption for six months. Cutting off a Lexus, so it has to lock up its anti-lock brakes earns a bonus exhaust system and a cellphone whipping from a man in an Armani suit.

Best idea yet. Convincing The Neighbor. Have your neighbor throw an old ratty foldable car seat in his front lawn, and then stack dead plants and old pieces of wood on it, throw in a couple old mismatched shoes, and have him leave it there for a week for everyone to see. Ask him if you can sell your old beaten up bar stools at his rummage sale. Then make sure it snows fifteen inches, record the neighborhood dogs making yellow snow on the mound, and when the snow finally starts to melt, go out real late one night with a plastic bag filled with used cat litter, with a small hole in it, and throw all the junk back into his courtyard, topped off with the leaking bag of used litter. He’s convinced if he cleans up the courtyard and keeps saying “Hi Neighbor”; you lose if you wake up and find all the junk on your deck, egg yolk on the window, and he flips you off everytime you walk past. Prizes range from new neighbors to decreased property values.

Hey waitaminnit! I just saw this on Springer. Maybe there is hope for reality based TV in the 21st century.

Submission to Writer’s Digest writing contest 2002

Personal essay category