From FoxBusiness.com – New York, NY, USA
By Nancy Colasurdo
June 10, 2009
Thicken your skin and brace yourselves, one and all. I am about to unabashedly offend half the population about their television choices.
Really, I need to know — what is entertaining about people behaving badly?
First of all, a disclaimer. I watch some pretty nonsensical television and I am not going to pretend I’m up on the latest PBS content or that I’m looping The History Channel 24/7.
However, what is with viewers finding Bridezillas et al. a ‚Äúguilty pleasure”? I have never watched a second of this show, and yet I am completely offended by it just based on the constant commercials I’m subjected to while watching hilarious reruns of The Golden Girls.
Is a woman supposed to get a pass for acting like a bratty 2-year-old because she’s decked out in pristine Vera Wang? Is it acceptable to scream at the person you’re about to marry or throw flowers on the ground in a tantrum because you’re a bride? Why is that entertainment?
What used to constitute guilty pleasure — i.e., taking the Cosmo quiz or eating a chocolate truffle — now seems quaint in comparison. Schadenfreude reigns supreme. It seems the need to think ‚ÄúI am so much more sane than her” now supersedes the need to think ‚ÄúWow, isn’t she inspiring.”
Yikes.
With apologies to Countess Luann de Lesseps, who I interviewed in April and found delightful, this has to explain the appeal of the lineup of ‚ÄúReal Housewives” shows. First of all, they are not housewives at all. Second of all, while doing research for my interview with de Lesseps, I tuned in to the New York version and was appalled at how these women backstab each other and triangulate in nearly every segment. It’s troubling.
In my world, if we engage in this behavior at all (and I certainly did at one time), it ideally ends when we’re in our 20s at the latest. That’s when we do something really radical: communicate our feelings and thoughts about a person directly to the person and not behind her back. I don’t know what’s more disturbing, that so many viewers find this pleasurable or that they think it’s truly how women interact. Some of us have worked really hard — expending time and money — not to be that.
Good communication can be learned. I had a life-coaching client once who was having daily agitation issues with a co-worker and it was seriously affecting her ability to do her job in a meaningful way. As an outsider, it was clear to me the co-worker was undercutting my client because she was threatened and simultaneously envious of her. My client was trying every which way to avoid direct communication and was resistant to examining her own role in the dynamic. When she came around and started addressing the woman directly, she diffused the situation and made her workdays markedly easier.
Don’t get me wrong. I know there are healthy communicators out there watching this nasty stuff, too. Some of it is about not being able to avert their eyes from the train wreck. And maybe I didn’t mind it as much when it wasDallas or Melrose Place because those shows and their ilk never purported to be ‚Äúreality.”
Let’s take another show I might watch just once if someone paid me cash to do so — Jon and Kate Plus Eight. Or as one friend recently referred to it on Facebook, Jon and Kate and Their Exploited Eight. Since I don’t live under a rock, I am aware of what the series is about. Its basic appeal seems to be making viewers who didn’t know what they were getting into with parenthood feel better about their lives. Any household has to be calmer than Jon and Kate’s, right?
Sad.
If that isn’t a big enough dose of validation for beleaguered parents, there’s always the upcoming Raising Sextuplets. And soon enough Nadya Suleman will grace the small screen. It’s endless.
Maybe it’s the Susie Sunshine in me that would much prefer to watch somebody transform a room from drab to inviting or to see clever writing come to life on a classic sitcom. I don’t know.
What I do know is I can’t even stand to watch a commercial where people are behaving badly. There’s one, I don’t recall the product (that says something), where a woman keeps telling her toddler to stop touching things and then she orders her husband in a chilling tone to change the baby’s diaper. What an unappealing side of a wife and mother — nagging dictator.
Cringe. All the world needs a life coach.
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There are 4 Responses so far...
You could add The Apprentice to that list. I watched it in Season 1 as I thought Donald Trump would share some words of wisdom each week. It was shocking how most of these ‘successful’ business people acted and communicated with each other. I had hoped (silly me) that the show would have a higher standard of people than other reality shows. Wrong!
Perhaps all the world could benefit from coaching skills. Imagine the change in communication that could result from that.
We TiVod “Celebrity Apprentice” and fast-forwarded through most of the season’s episodes. However, the final choice (a person who would have not only been “fired” but SUED in a real office over a person who out-produced her opponent) was the end of our addiction to that particular form of video crack.
Donald, yuh fy-uhd.
Am I the only one who sees a huge reality show in all of this? Pitch it as “Nanny 911″ meets “The Real Housewives of New York.” We take the out-of-control non-wives and give them a no-nonsense life coach… hilarity ensues.
Reality gold.
I vote Melissa Rivers and Octomom onto THAT island. What life coach (in their right mind) would attempt such a coaching nightmare reality show? Anyone…anyone?