Lingering Questions

One of the greatest mysteries about reality is reality shows.

Specifically one aspect of reality shows, beyond the fact that they still exist:

If you look at a show like Big Brother, or Survivor, there’s always one fact about their “guests” they never fail to educate the audience about, and that is their occupation. Their jobs are listed on screen virtually every time you see them, which is another weird thing. I understand the concept of making the show easy to pick up on for the flip-through audience by listing the names of the people on TV, but after thirteen hour-long episodes you should be expected to pick up their names on your own. Showing the person’s name every time the camera focuses on them is really saying something about the audience, and that is that they’re dumb as dirt.

Beyond that, why should we care what jobs these people have, or had? I say, “had,” because if they can afford to take the two months off work to dick around on a TV show, they likely didn’t have much of a career happening in the first place.

Still, every reality show insists on categorizing human beings based on their occupation. If you’re trying out for a contestant on the Bachelorette and your occupation isn’t C.E.O., doctor, or cowboy-strippergram, you’d best not apply. The same goes for the Bachelor, if of course, you’re the Bachelor. Who cares what he women on those shows do, since they’re expected to squeeze out babies for the remainder of their lives from the safety of their kitchens. The same concept applies for Rock of Love and the rest of those, “date a minor celebrity” show. The women are meaningless arbitrations. It doesn’t matter what they did for a living before going on the show, (one would assume they were groupies, strippers, or coke addicts), the only thing that matters is that they’re desperate and bitchy.

Similarly, being a housewife on, “The Real Housewives,” isn’t a prerequisite. A lot of the women on that show aren’t married and have careers of their own, making their, “housewife,” status absurd. The only thing that matters about them is that they have fake plastic boobs to go along with their faces, and that they are huge bitches.

Even shows like Wipeout, where the entire premise is for people to fall into a mudpit, people still have to have a clearly defined career. They can't be real homemakers, or between jobs, or work part-time at two different occupations, because that’d be confusing. They can’t have the lowlier jobs like, “fry cook,” or “night-shift manager at Bed Bath and Beyond.” Having a terrible job like, “bartender,” is perfectly acceptable though, because people think it’s fun. They can’t lie about what they do either, because the internet is obsessed with digging up every bit of dirt about people on reality shows, including their sexual pasts and every speeding ticket they’ve earned. Lying about being a junior accountant for a big firm when you’re really just a trash collector is as big an offense as lying about killing your best friend in a hunting accident, or being a member of a hate group.

The reason for all this is clear: we’re a classist society. Years of social evolution hasn’t elevated us past the point of the peasant/pauper relationship. Roles have changed, but prejudices have not. If you’re a blue collar worker, you’re supposed to be rooting for the blue collar workers. You’re also expected to pick winners based solely on a person’s occupation. If someone’s a college football star, they’re expected to win the pointless scavenger race as opposed to the day-camp worker.

The weirdest thing is: all of TV aside from reality shows explain to us how little a person’s occupation actually matters. Every workplace-themed sitcom from Cheers to The Office explains to us how wildly divergent people with the same occupation are. You shouldn’t need TV to know that, though, when you have real life. People have workplaces. People know how much everyone they work with sucks at what they’re doing. It’s life. What a person does for a living and how much that person is paid for doing it has little or nothing to do with that person. Stranger still, we know our managers and top-people are more likely to be raging sociopaths and brown-nosing toadies, but when we hear a person is Vice-President of a company we automatically have a better opinion of them. Why then, whenever we meet new people we ask, and are asked, “What do you do for a living?” Half the people out there jump from job to job, likely never keeping the same occupation for more than a handful of years. No one has a resume with just one job title on it, because that’d be stupid. People pity, “lifers.” You don’t actually respect a person more for working the same terrible job for dozens of years when you know for a fact that person’s lucky to even have a job.

Everyone on reality TV has the exact same occupation: reality TV star. It doesn’t matter if they’re Vanilla Ice and working on a construction site. They’re not former, “rappers,” or current, “construction workers,” they’re reality TV stars.