Unreal Reality TV

Sometimes I consider what amount of money would be enough for me to have my life broadcast to a national audience on what is known as Reality TV, and I always come up with the same answer: No amount. In fact, if the producers of such a venture held a gun to my head and said, "Do it or we will shoot," I would simply arrange myself comfortably and say, "Shoot."

There is currently a show called "My 600-lb Life" that features hugely obese freaky people, their tiny faces perched atop acres of fat, who cannot even move and have to be hoisted up with cranes and have not left their homes in 20 years. There are the moronic, Botoxed, rich housewives with all the jewelry and makeup who plan parties and go shopping and gossip about one another. There are the horrible marriages where the wives swap places and go live with strangers for two weeks and yell at the new husbands and kids. There are the mentally ill hoarders and their sobbing families who live like deranged animals in houses crammed to the ceiling with garbage and Barbie dolls in their original, unopened packages. There are drug addicts and tubby dieters and country bumpkins letting us see into their trailer park trash double-wides where they eat squirrels for dinner.

I sense all these things as a channel-surf by, never stopping for more than a few seconds for fear I will see something that will keep me up at night. Still, I wonder at the very existence of these shows and the people behind them who think they are a good idea, and the advertisers who sponsor them, as if anyone would buy their products after all that.