The Real Blah Blah of Blah Blah Blah

Woke up from my afternoon nap on a picture perfect Saturday afternoon outside. I dozed off while watching something on cable TV and it was still on when I woke up. I was pretty tired after a whole week of work and after all the housework and swimming in the morning. As I woke up the TV was showing one of the reunion shows for one of the “Real Housewives” shows. I personally never follow those shows, as they don’t really interest me. At the end of the day why would I want to watch shows about a bunch of ridiculously wealthy women whose face are faker than most Barbie dolls on the shelves? However, that reunion show I accidentally bumped into completely blew me off the water.

You might think is it that good? The answer is no. But it is more dramatic than any of the scripted dramas you can find on any channels. These women from the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” were so feisty that you think you are watching “Daniel inside the Lion Den”. All the accusations, arguments, scheming and betrayals put soaps like “Days of Our Lives” and “Bold and Beautiful” to shame. Certainly these rich New Jersey women were living days of their lives being bold and beautiful but the compound product was just dramas after dramas that choke you to death. While watching it I was wondering how could these women survive that much drama they stirred up within a few months of filming?

However, my accidental encounter of this show got me to think about something else: why are there so many of these shows about the bitchiness of women to each other? And why are there no such shows about the immaturity of men? Doing a bit of research on this topic, the “Real Housewives” series currently has the follow locales: New York City; Orange County; Atlanta; New Jersey; Beverley Hills; Miami; Vancouver; and the latest addition Melbourne. Please feel free to add any more that you know in case I missed out any locations. And on top of that, we have all the modeling shows like “ Next Top Model” and the latest “The Face ”. These so called reality modeling competitions have on different occasions claimed to spark the approval of inappropriate behaviours among these contestants (who are mostly young girls), specifically the bitchy bullying of other contestants. Surely the latest (?) season of American Top Model had included guys in the mix but from the advertising materials it seems it is going to be about the girls drooling all over those six pecks and what lies below it, and in order to achieve that cat fighting among each other (and why is it women’s fighting are cat fights when people named these women “bitches”?).

Surely there was one show about guys called “The A-List New York”. But cast of the show was a bunch of gay guys in New York, not your average straight blokes. So talk about stereotypes on gay guys being the bitchy bunch in the society. I do not know whether this actually improved the image of gay guys or it further cemented the stereotypes.

Maybe someone would argue that straight guys are just not interesting to watch. Maybe but then how would you know if you don’t have a show tested? Just throwing some ideas out there for some stereotypical “reality” shows – what about a show about a bunch of surfer dudes who do nothing most days but training their six packs, surf on the beach and picking up girls along the way? Them fighting over any female being walking into the bar or working at a bar would be good to watch. There could so much action when they throw punches at each other and got thrown out of the bar? What about a show about Rugby players in Australia? People would love to see them training shirtless all the time, hitting on girls or maybe even each other, not to mention getting drunk in the public and putting their contracts on the line. The stress and anxiety they caused on themselves but blaming on the society would be so cool to watch. If we can have “Housewives” shows about their litigations why not a Rugby player show about how many times they got sent to the courts to defend their career because of what they did outside the field? I would prefer to watch these on these shows instead on national news, which for me has no intrinsic social news value at all.

I mean at the end of the day if you have worked in the media long enough you would know that these so-called reality shows are portraying “edited realities” that do not necessarily be the “real thing”. However, what I found disturbing is that these shows seem to perpetuate certain social stereotypes while claiming to show people a “real” side of these participants. Maybe some of the participants do think it is a good opportunity to leverage their “Housewife” career or such, but is it doing the society any good? I doubt so. But then in a world about ratings and income, who cares about social good? At the end of the day, in this volatile industry, most of the time the good may not prevail.

I think I better shut up.