Topic 8: Reality TV, and how it's made losers famous, and made famous losers.
I’ve got an idea for a reality show. It’s called “The Most Pathetic Person In America”, and I think it’ll be a huge hit, if only you, my loyal readers, will give me a bit of backing, and some unsolicited feedback.
The idea came to me when I was watching America’s Got Talent recently, and noticed that each contestant that comes on there has just the most depressing back-stories known to man. There’s never anyone auditioning for a singing gig on that show that came from Greenwich, CT, and gained his amazing talent through years of very extensive and expensive voice lessons. I’m pretty sure anyone with any shred of privilege or success outside of their talent is left on the cutting room floor, and is forced to return to their lives of better-than-mediocrity.
People with any kind of happy life are not allowed on reality television (unless, of course, we, the viewers, are supposed to hate them). Contestants on America’s Got Talent are given time to tell their stories, and I swear to you that I’m probably making this up when I relay one of their stories to you. (While I am making it up, I am not exaggerating)
“When I was growing up, my mother used to take me to work with her; she couldn’t afford a babysitter or daycare. Back then, she worked 9 jobs. And even working 40 hours a day, her combined income was still well below minimum wage. While she was working as a janitor at a waste treatment facility, I used to sit in the car with the radio on, listening to the music of the time. Due to a radiation leak in our apartment building (we shared a studio with three other families) I was basically deaf. But during those 40 hours each day, sitting in the car, I taught myself to hear, to speak, and to sing. At the age of 12, I had gotten a job working as an MC and a Sinatra impersonator at a local crack house, and the tips I raised went to paying for mom’s chemotherapy. It was a year later that she died, and on her death-bed she told me…”
And that was the least depressing story of the episode. Reality TV seems to be shifting from its original purpose, giving away fabulous cash prizes in exchange for eating bull testicles, to allowing the mass media to capitalize on the depressing pasts of everyone in America, while also allowing us, the unwashed masses, to sit back in our wingback chairs and talk amongst ourselves as to which charity case looks more like a whore.
Anyways, I digress. It was all of the above that gave me the idea for “The Most Pathetic Person In America”. Every week, contestants show up, tell their horrendously depressing back-stories, and we, the privileged, phone or text our votes in as to who we think is The Most Pathetic Person In America. Here’s a sample story… the one I’d use.
“My papa was a great old man; I can see him with a shovel in his hands. See, education he never had, but he did wonders when the times got bad. The little money from the crops he raised barely paid the bills we made. Life had kicked him down to the ground. When he tried to get up life would kick him back down. One day Papa called me to his dyin' bed, put his hands on my shoulders and in his tears he said, ‘Patches, I'm dependin' on you, son, to pull the family through. My son, it's all left up to you.’”
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