TV Democracy

originally published March 26, 2008

These days, democracy and social justice are hiding in the most unlikely of places. Behind the audio-visual bombast of shows like Fox’s “American Idol” and ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” appear cultural models otherwise alien to the American viewer’s lived experience. A well-worn tactic of the marketing trade - that of drawing the consumer toward purchase and brand loyalty with the carrots of community and socialistic, egalitarian values - has been expanded to form the basis of the nation’s most popular “reality” television programs. This method of luring consumers now haunts primetime television, but, now as before, the democratic, communitarian or socialistic lures remain as unattainable as the everlasting bliss we are told will accompany our purchases. (At first glance, “American Idol” appears the most vibrant, functional democratic system working on a large scale in our country. For one, the only criterion for participation is talent. The various religious, property, racial and gender-based restrictions that exclude all but a few Americans from political pursuits are present on “American Idol” in only the faintest, rarely detectable degree. The show’s record-setting viewership would fall to near nil were it to adopt the sorts of cronyism, class exclusion and aristocratic mode of succession that mark Washington politics. Its success is contingent on its permission of regular folks into the competition.

And the regular folks actually win. Frustrating the designs of record industry puppeteers, America chooses non-white, “overweight,” or irreparably plain-looking “idols.” Washington’s favorite, the affluent, straight, white male Protestant, is almost never the shoo-in. The “Idol” audience overlooks Madison Avenue’s favorite as well: the pitifully thin, tall, sinewy specimen. Contrary to well-packaged and manipulated industry offerings, we choose the normal, the next-door, the plain, and the - gasp! - overweight. In a word, when asked who we choose to succeed, we choose ourselves.

But after the final votes are cast and the winner is declared, we find that beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder, but of the stockholder. Suddenly wrested from the democracy from which he or she was produced, the performer is immediately a product. He or she becomes subject to the implacable currents of the profit motive. The democratically elected “idol” is now a corporate asset, a container of capital. He or she is not an “idol,” but, quite contrarily, a sacrifice chosen to be offered up to corporate gods. The audience’s enjoyment, formerly the primary value, is subsumed by the need to generate revenue in a way the controllers see as safe and expedient. The performer’s body becomes merely a husk from which to extract value. Had this been a sentencing rather than an election?

And, finally, we find that our little democracy was always owned by someone else. The illusory democracy was only a tool used by tyrants, with all its leverage and effect being completely contained in an ultimately non-democratic system. It is a bit like being offered free round-trip tickets on a flight simulator. “American Idol” has preyed on our politico-cultural wanderlust, offering only a vision of the things kept from us.

“Reality” Versus Reality

ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” regularly receives close to 15 million viewers, enough to place it in the top three or four reality shows on television. The show’s devotees tune in each week to watch a deserving family have their squalid-to-modest homes “made over” into large, comfortable and well-outfitted digs. In most episodes a great many members of the community assist in the construction. Rare is the episode in which family members do not break into weeping at the sight of their new bounty. (The show’s success rests on the new home being justly deserved by the families, being a seeming reflection of their merit. Necessarily, there is an implication that the family has been living in conditions under-proportionate to their merit for some time, perhaps for their whole lives. The show’s function is to restore, or bring about for the first time, a commensurability of human worth and material worth. The show’s success relies on its ability to correct what has been hitherto, by all other means, irreparable. Perhaps the audience’s enjoyment is compounded by the implicit knowledge that the capital used for the new home was necessarily taken from some less worthy person(s) who possessed it in some degree of unjustness.

Americans tune in to “Extreme Makeover” to explore the possibility of justice, specifically economic justice. Viewers recognize both the impropriety of the family’s deprivation and the need to correct it. The show’s celebrated and much-enjoyed function is the restoration of wealth from the hands of improper possession to its rightful place.

An area of speculation emerges: What if the family’s hard work had been properly remunerated all along? Could years of tragedy and strife have been avoided had the parents been paid wages and salaries great enough to accommodate the potential problems? The question becomes more pronounced in an imagined episode featuring one of the many families who work for Disney/ ABC, performing its more menial duties for paltry wages and salaries - the many janitors, commissary employees or production laborers, for instance. Learning of the struggle of these families, viewers might be compelled to inquire, “Why weren’t they just paid appropriately all along?”

The featured families’ stories are usually presented as exceptional. A chronic illness or death might afflict the family, or an unfortunate series of economic events may have beset them. But despite ABC’s packaging of the families’ predicaments as extraordinary, the tales are really quite typical. An “insert-working-class-dilemma-here” circumstance constitutes each episode’s premise: a lost job, the death of the breadwinner, a costly medical problem. The families are hard-working, but their hard work has not been properly compensated. Without a safety net, the families’ medical dilemmas or series of hardships lead to economic disasters to which the viewers are made witness. Viewers are invited to speculate how the families’ children would have developed in the terrible trouble from which they narrowly escape. The rampant success of the show is testament to the universality of the families’ struggles. The impulse of selfless goodwill that brings millions to the show each week likely mingles with the personal wish that such fortune would find the viewer who, too, feels improperly handled by the economy.

Perhaps it is the great and growing distance from these cultural values that draws us to that flashing box in our living rooms. Maybe this is how vast, modern communities collectively dream. Our most valuable goals are mediated by forces and factions we rarely see. A healthy self-image is something to be purchased; economic equity is a gift from corporate controllers; democracy is a vision cast by autocrats. The authorities recognize that authoritarianism doesn’t sell, and they must disguise autocratic greed in the attire of democracy and goodwill. The cultural carrot dangles always out of reach, and we are led to trudge hungrily forward, always forward. The ultimate  paradox at work is that we must remain permanently unhappy to achieve happiness, for the technocrats tell us that any industry and its wider economy must keep growing. The existing modern economy necessitates chronically unhappy consumers spending evenings  on  sofas desiring something else, hanging hopes on brand names or, lately, imagining democracy and social justice in their absence. The 30-second spot for dish detergent still promises spot-free souls, but now hour-length visions of democracy and justice excite our imaginations. If there is such thrill in the illusion, what might the real thing feel like? Might we cut out the intermediaries and make reality television reality?

Matthew Pulver