The past few months have had me desperately wanting to break the fourth wall in the Reality TV show that is now apparently all of our lives. Needless to say, season 2 of the Trump White House has been as soapy as an episode of EastEnders, as dystopian as The Handmaid’s Tale and with all the black comedy of White Lotus, but somehow less realistic.
The Greatest Showman
There have been many moments in the last one hundred days or so that have had many people saying, ‘you couldn’t write this.’ From the Black Mirror-esque nightmare fuel that is the AI Trump Gaza Strip and AI Trump Pope, to Canada as the 51st state and the Signal chat saga, all of which have been among some of the biggest plot twists. But the unreality of it all is no accident. Trump is self-aware and even revels in the fact that he is the main character on the global stage and screens. Specifically, there was a moment in late February when, amongst the chaos of the Zelensky-Trump showdown, Donald Trump ceased his attack on the Ukrainian president and turned to the world’s media with a wry smile, saying, ‘This is going to be great television.’ It’s almost as if the bust-up had been enacted for the sole benefit of the audience and the ‘ratings’ he is always going on about.
Clearly, Trump as President of the United States is also Trump as star of The Apprentice. He acts when he acts all in the name of his beloved TV ‘ratings.’ But this time, it’s not just Thursdays at 9 pm EST on NBC, it’s 24 hours a day on the world’s news channels; everything from BBC News to Al Jazeera.
It begs the question, to very ironically borrow a phrase from film and television: ‘you’re probably wondering how I got here?’ We are all wondering how we got here — a world in which reality is more and more like ‘Reality’ TV.
The Birth of Reality TV
The death of reality began with the birth of ‘Reality’ TV. Although the reality show has its origins in Candid Camera, a hidden camera prank show that began in 1948, the first modern reality television show was MTV’s The Real World in 1992, which followed ‘real’ young adults in America. But reality TV firmly hit its stride in the early noughts with shows like Big Brother, The Kardashians, Made in Chelsea, TOWIE, need I go on? Ironically, over time, Reality TV as a genre that professed to depict real lives and real people, has come to mean the exact opposite. ‘Reality’ TV is now synonymous with highly produced, often scripted, and overly edited melodrama masquerading as reality. And it is the rise of the reality TV star that first created a blurring between a real person and the character shown. While Kimberly Noel Kardashian is a flesh-and-blood human being, ‘Kim Kardashian’ of E! Network’s Keeping Up With The Kardashians (and now Hulu’s The Kardashians) are two separate entities, even though they talk and walk and look identical.
This artificial ‘reality’ does not end with the television screen, but has now extended itself to all our screens. Social media has created a new breed of ‘reality’ stars as influencers confidently show us what they eat in a day (known as the WIEIAD trend), and give us glimpses of days in their lives filled with picture-perfect Pilates classes, scenic runs, and unbelievably expensive meals out. Unfortunately, where the real person ends and the internet avatar begins has become dangerously less clear than was the case with ‘Reality’ TV stars of days past. Unlike ‘Reality’ TV, where we as the audience understand that what we’re watching is reality in air quotes, social media has blurred the line between reality and artificial ‘reality’ as influencers profess their absolute authenticity.
Is Anything Real Anymore?
Unfortunately, today’s Influencers do indeed influence our behaviour, and we as a society have begun to believe that the ‘reality’ we watch on reels is how we should all be living our real lives. This grim reality (pun intended) becomes startlingly clear in the way that we as a generation talk. Our colloquialisms are filled with the idea of narrativising our lives as if we too are characters on the screen. Everyone is constantly ‘doing things for the plot,’ completing ‘side quests’ and in different ‘arcs’ or ‘eras’ of their lives. Eerily, we have started to live our lives as if we are being constantly filmed and watched, ‘romanticising’ and ‘aestheticising’ our personal realities for the benefit of a non-existent audience.
And so, as we become more like characters and less like people, and reality is increasingly like the ‘Reality’ TV we used to mock (not mention the looming spectre of an AI-generated world), is it any wonder that the President of the United States is himself the ultimate ‘reality’ TV star?
DISCLAIMER: The articles on our website are not endorsed by, or the opinions of Shout Out UK (SOUK), but exclusively the views of the author.
