A friend recently rewatched a few seasons of MTV’s Jersey Shore, a show that debuted in 2009 just as TV was fully embracing the trend toward reality television. This gave me the opportunity to watch a couple of episodes with him. As we watched, we got into a discussion about how the conversation at the time centered on whether reality TV was merely a fad or a signal of a permanent change in the way we all watched TV. In hindsight, we decided that the question people should have been asking was why the shift hadn’t happened any sooner.
Consider it this way, reader – in most of entertainment, we prefer the living and spontaneous to the scripted and edited. Almost every live sport, for example, has more popularity than professional wrestling, and although sports movies can excite viewers they never elicit the same passion or intensity of those who are in the crowd at the big game. Music fans have always shelled out the big bucks for concert tickets without matching that investment in music videos. And theater buffs will always prefer a live show to seeing the same play on TV in the same way a comedy fan would rather see a stand-up routine instead of simply reading the jokes off a piece of paper.
Looking back, it seems that around the time Jersey Shore debuted it was only TV comedies and dramas that were failing to take advantage of our preference for the spontaneity of a living performance. It’s weird to think that in an industry where people would never dream of scripting the equivalent of a game show that they would continue on for so long without putting the real life inspiration for someone like George Costanza on prime time.
