I’ve always detested the so-called Reality TV genre. Really can’t abide it at all. It doesn’t matter what topic: celebrities, regular folks, dancing, surviving, loving, hating, watching reality TV. I find it awful and depressing.
I think this is because reality is not real. At least, reality television isn’t real. It’s an edited down, souped up, hammed up, extreme version of real life. All the good bits, the dramatic bits, put together for our entertainment. Packaged up as real, but not really real at all; simply entertainment, of a type.
It doesn’t convey real life, and I don’t think it was ever meant to. Real life is running all the time, and has always run, and you simply can’t convey the huge periods periods of not much happening, periods of normalcy, not even with vlogging. Normalcy is not viewable as entertainment, not even if you attempted some Truman Show-type of constant coverage. If you did you’d get the view the camera gives you, not your view, the individual’s.
When I was much younger, well before reality TV emerged, I sometimes day-dreamed about what it would be like televising me driving on a long journey, exploring my musings and regaling myself and my unseen audience with my wit. How would that ever be interesting to others, even if you had the most charismatic person in the world, unless you presented the highlights?
You can’t ever replicate the individual’s perspective of the reality they see and experience. Maybe there’s a different format yet to be explored which will do justice to real life. But probably not.