Their License to Thrill Is Revoked

Today, we tackle a cultural calamity of the 21st Century. It occurs to us in the Federation that many of our fellow lifeforms have taken to viewing things on television that do not, by our standards, qualify as worthy additions to the basic (and not-so-basic) cable lineup. What we speak of is, of course, the so-called "reality TV" craze. We use the term loosely, and only because that is the recognized jargon for the new fad in mindless broadcasting of the day. So, to the issue of "reality TV," here's the view from Chuckonia...
First and foremost, there's too much of this reality TV being pumped out by the networks and filling slots that could be happily occupied for years at a time by intelligently-written, expertly-produced, and generally entertaining programs. God forbid that someone should actually sit down for a while and come up with a situation for a situation comedy or a trackable plot for a drama. We don't want old stories and situations regurgitated, but how many times can we sit on the couch wondering which two reality stars may or may not hook up before they get off some island (which we think is a sand bar in someone's backyard lake)? What reality TV producers have done is taken the creative process and cut it off at the knees. They generate a "situation," here being the rules and conditions of the given show, and refuse to generate stories to push that situation. They go out and find five times as much cast as they would for a solid show, praying that at least one of these complete unknowns may emerge as a memorable "character," and leave the carrying of the story to them. Unfortunately for the real actors in the world, these "characters" are nothing more than people who play up their own personality for the sake of 15 minutes (sometimes literally) of fame.
Who decided that TV needed more reality (such as they call it) anyway? When we were growing up (though, in a way, we all still are), the most reality we wanted on TV was the 5:00 news before another rerun of "Diff'rent Strokes" aired. And what was ever wrong with the situations and plots of those days? Maybe this is just becoming an attack on modern television, but the problem at hand is that modern TV isn't presented as 100% fiction or 100% fact. It's a weird blur that is further distorting society's, already, pathetic grasp on (real) reality. The fact that TV was mostly fiction didn't make it unbelievable. We just knew the happenings on TV weren't happening right then. We still knew that four old ladies with little in common could get along in a house in Miami; or that an African-American butler could go to run a governor's mansion and within eight years be running for governor of that state himself; or that a lady could meet a fellow, know that it's much more than a hunch, and that their groups could somehow form a family, and make them all a very Brady bunch; or that a mortal man could marry a witch against the prejudices of her parents (ok, maybe not that one). Basically, TV was more real when it was obviously NOT real.
If someone from the pre-reality TV era were to get a TV Guide from the future (our present, for those of you who don't follow time travel lingo), this might be his assumptions of some of the current reality TV show titles:

• "Survivor" - A "Rescue 911" kind of show chronicling stories of people who have overcome tremendous obstacles in their lives.
• "Hell's Kitchen" - A drama about kids growing up in the ghettos of New York, facing gang violence and street thugs.
• "The Real Gilligan's Island" - An E! True Hollywood Story mini-series telling about the making of the popular 60s TV series, complete with cast and crew interviews.
• "The Simple Life" - A Martha Stewart-style home improvement and craft show, loaded with great cooking tips and expert advice to make your life "a good thing."
• "The Surreal Life" - A sitcom about a simple country bumpkin who discovers royal roots and gets whisked away to rule some hardly-known but majorly loaded European nation.
• "The Amazing Race" - A cheap made-for-TV movie knock-off of "Cannonball Run."
• "Big Brother" - A MASH-like sitcom about CIA agents in the days after the Cold War.

We could go on and on, but the bottom line is that a well-thought, well-written script with good actors is far superior to the current trend of mindless, scriptless crap that accommodates an increasingly mindless audience. Now, all our "Survivor"-loving friends are ready to bomb Chuckonia and renounce their honorary citizenship of the Federation. Let us clarify that the audience is increasingly mindless because these reality shows are rotting your brains. We believe the brains of the reality-watching public existed but are fading fast. The world has enjoyed television programming since the late 1940s, but now, it seems that someone has revoked the TV's license to thrill and left us with far less valuable entertainment. That's the way we see it in Chuckonia.