IT is sometimes hard to detect much difference between artfully edited reality shows like “The Hills” on MTV and scripted dramas like “Gossip Girl” on CW and the recently canceled Fox series “The OC.”
Yet the more reality shows mimic fictional series in tone, look and format, the easier it is to see where they differ: class consciousness. Sitcoms and dramatic series drum up tension by assaulting social barriers. Most reality shows take them for granted and leave them untouched.
It is a distinction that will become even more obvious as reality shows multiply, partly in response to the strike of the Writers Guild. Scripted series deliver the image of the society we would like to be: racially integrated, classless, well intentioned. Reality shows are more honest, but they also breed a kind of country dysmorphic disorder: half the nation is blond, beautiful and driving sports cars through Beverly Hills, while the other half is blond, sleazily oversexed and prone to hair-pulling and name-calling.
In fact, among the many subgenres of reality television, only one tinkers with social engineering at all. Before the all-volunteer army, the military served as America’s melting pot. Now reality competitions like “The Amazing Race” and “America’s Next Top Model” fill the void, putting contestants through a form of Fort Benning basic training. “Survivor,” and even “The Biggest Loser,” purposely toss together all kinds of people from all walks of life who might otherwise never meet.
But society is more cautious when it comes to the quest for love. Romance novels are one thing. In real life most people favor a marriage of equals.
“The Hills,” like its forerunner, “Laguna Beach,” aims to be absorbed as drama. This crypto-scripted show dispenses with the so-called confessionals, a convention of the reality genre in which a protagonist breaks away to vent directly to the camera, and relies instead on evocative shots of skylines or highway traffic at dusk, lingering close-ups and moody pop music to underscore emotional highs and lows.
The principals, whose romances and kitchen quarrels furnish plotlines, are not really actors, but neither are they ordinary people exactly; they are a new hybrid of semiprofessional personalities who play themselves on camera. Men and women recruited for their resemblance to Us magazine celebutantes are now featured players in Us magazine, and boast lifestyles as lavish, and socially restricted, as Paris Hilton’s. More so, actually: Ms. Hilton, after all, was a star of “The Simple Life,” a “Green Acres” takeoff that propelled her and her friend Nicole Richie to rough it as country bumpkins, trading stores for chores. But that fish-out-of-water formula ebbed; reality fans seem to prefer to watch pigs in clover.
Nowadays, the classes don’t collide on reality television.
The CW network has had success with its competition series “Beauty and the Geek,” but the pairing of opposites — dumb beauties and intelligent geeks — is illusory; the women are all alike, and so are the men.
“The Real World” began on MTV as an experiment in group dynamics, but it is now more of a dating service with no exit — and accordingly, the participants seem ever more socially and culturally akin. So much so, in fact, that the producers now spice up the monotony with pop-up commentary: sarcastic asides about the housemates delivered by two young, MTV know-it-alls. (Unconsciously, perhaps, the pair provide the kind of critical distance — and class awareness — spouted by the wise servant in Molière, or for that matter the wisecracking maid on “Maude.”)
On “The Hills,” a preserve for the young, good-looking and privileged, there is no other side of the tracks. Meanwhile, “A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila” caters to the trailer-park set. MTV promotes its heroine, a Web siren, as “the first bisexual bachelorette,” but the show isn’t shocking because it pits 16 lesbians and semi-lesbians against 16 heterosexual men. What is scandalous is the group’s homogeneity: all of them seem so poignantly coarse and equally undereducated — “The Jerry Springer Show: The Next Generation.”
On “The Hills,” girls fight with shrugs, false smiles and pinched sarcasm (“Have a great night”). On “Real World: Sydney” and “A Shot at Love” or even “I Love New York,” another “Bachelorette”-style showdown, friction is expressed with body slams and punches.
Scripted television favors myth. “Ugly Betty,” on ABC, puts a poor, plain girl (America Ferrera) from Queens deep inside the offices of a top fashion magazine and draws its humor from the class struggle between Betty and her snooty, conniving colleagues.
“The Hills” puts Lauren, an alumna of “Laguna Beach,” inside the real-life West Coast office of Teen Vogue, and draws its humor from the sleek, vacuous congruity of that world. Everybody fits in. Lauren’s tasks consist mostly of attending red-carpet premieres.
A recurring joke of the show is how the leaders of Hollywood’s young and pampered set feel oppressed by their careers. Lauren’s former friend Heidi, who works for an event planner, returns home in a white, bare-shouldered top, her blond hair impeccably blown out, and is greeted by her fiancé, Spencer. “How was your day, sweetheart?” he asks somewhat sardonically. “Long,” she replies wearily. “Tiring.”
“The OC” built its story line on the cultural collision between its underclass hero, Ryan (Benjamin McKenzie), a teenage runaway, and the affluent and gorgeous denizens of Orange County, Calif. “Gossip Girl” pits a middle-class teenager, the son of a former rock singer, against the snobbish scions of Park Avenue and the Hamptons.
“Laguna Beach” never bothered with such contrivance. All its protagonists were young, wealthy and gorgeous, and they found plenty of drama in the small slights and petty misunderstandings of the overly examined life. Lauren went on to become one of the heroines of “The Hills,” and is once again surrounded by a posse of improbably blond, good-looking and pampered young people. The closest that series has come to a misalliance is a date Lauren’s friend Whitney had with her personal trainer, a tall, dark and handsome New Yorker.
The dramedy “Desperate Housewives” is not known for redeeming social values, but even that ABC soap opera tried to integrate Wisteria Lane in its second season, recruiting Alfre Woodard to play an African-American concert pianist who keeps a mystery man chained up in the basement.
“The Real Housewives of Orange County” doesn’t try to build racial understanding; its heroines, indistinguishable in plunging necklines and plumped-up lips, are too busy with facial reconstruction. These housewives do not need murder mysteries or race issues to hold attention. Their drama revolves around the self-indulgent middle-aged woman’s race against the ravages of time and cellulite. It is silly and excruciating to watch, a menopausal minstrel show.
There are other reality subgenres that follow the same unwritten rule. “Run’s House,” featuring the family antics of the hip-hop star Joseph Simmons, known as Rev Run, inhabits a parallel universe to “Hogan Knows Best,” which follows the family antics of the pro wrestling celebrity Hulk Hogan’s home. And the same formula sustains “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” which centers on the wife and stepchildren of the former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner.
There is no fresh prince shaking up Bel Air.
All three of those reality families live a “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” existence — and share similar story lines, down to a star-struck daughter seeking to trade family connections for fame. Kim Kardashian, the ambitious daughter of Mr. Jenner’s pushy wife, Kris, poses for Playboy to jump-start her career. Run’s daughter Angela sets her sights on starting her own magazine so that she can throw star-studded parties, while Brooke Hogan aspires to pop stardom.
These family sagas unfurl concurrently on television, but despite the fact that most of the participants live in the wealthier neighborhoods of Los Angeles, they rarely intersect. The only notable example of cross-pollination was a romance between Mr. Jenner’s son Brody, who was a leading character on the short-lived Fox reality series “Princes of Malibu,” and Lauren Conrad of “The Hills.”
Reality shows are dramas lived out on beta-blockers; microproblems stretch over more episodes than any network drama would allow, no crimes are solved, no lives are saved, and the characters speak most eloquently when silent. Most of all they focus on mating, not social mobility.
Trouble seems to be in paradise for Laguna Beach-er Kristin Cavallari and her boyfriend of more than a year, Nick Zano.
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