Big news: Snookie is pregnant with baby number two! I would like to personally dedicate a huge 'MazelTov' to the lady who was formerly America's favorite hot mess. Thanks to "The Jersey Shore" (2009-2012), we all fondly remember all of Snookie's past triumphs - my personal favorite being that time the cops ruined the poor girl's afternoon by taking her to jail. But now, she's all grown up. She pulled it together, wrote a book, had a kid and is leading the life of the classy chick we all knew she could be. She, and the other cast members of "The Jersey Shore," have come a long way since their days of bumming around Seaside and giving the greatest state in the nation a bad name.
Of course, Snookie wouldn't have dreamed of classing up her life while "The Jersey Shore" was still on air, because who would watch a show about a group of twenty-somethings making reasonable decisions and saying intelligent things? The appeal of "The Jersey Shore" was that its cast did outrageously ridiculous things that nobody we know in real life would consider doing. If our favorite reality TV shows actually resembled reality, they would be far too boring to watch.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of reality TV. I can't remember the last time I came across a reality TV show I didn't find funny. Some of my best television memories include watching "Extreme Couponing" (2010-present) on TLC, or Lifetime's "Wife Swap" (2004-present). I have no problem binge watching "The Bachelor," (2002-present) especially when it stars the most eloquent and sensitive man out there: Juan Pablo. A few days ago I watched an episode of a PBS reality show with the premise of sending people out to live in the wilderness and pretend it is 1880. Reality TV is no stranger to me.
Of course, the situations that these shows put their subjects in are rarely realistic, and probably most of the footage they have of the reality stars acting like functioning, everyday people is cut to make room for their meltdowns. I can accept this. What I don't understand is how these shows draw people like me in in the first place. If you told me about a sitcom that's sort of about a toddler doing beauty pageants, but mainly about her family just sitting around the house talking, I would not be intrigued at all. But, make it a reality show, and you have "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" (2012-present). I, naturally, have seen several episodes of "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" and thoroughly enjoyed them.
The same pattern applies with almost every reality show I watch. I realize that the premises sound dumb in theory, and that if I were to see commercials for scripted shows with the same dumb premises, I probably wouldn't tune in. But if you turn a dumb idea into a reality show, I'm there. I think this is because reality TV doesn't have to pretend to be realistic the way scripted TV does. On a sitcom, even if it is the most out-there sitcom around, the characters can't stray too far away from the norm or people would write the show off as too hard to believe. But, with reality TV, we've already accepted that these people are real people, so they can be as ridiculous as we want them to be.
Reality TV gets a lot of criticism from a lot of people. I'd like to ask these people to relax and realize that enjoying an episode of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" (2009-present) never really hurt anybody.
Rebecca Hutchinson is a freshman majoring in international relations. She can be reached at Rebecca.Hutchinson@tufts.edu.
