Don't Normalize the Bad

Guilty pleasures. It’s so darned addicting for some to watch reality TV that depicts people behaving badly, airing dirty laundry, or maliciously causing embarrassment or discomfort for others. I’m not talking about scripted characters in shows who have been created as antagonists or anti-heroes. Those kinds of shows represent consequences for those actions or use them as threats and problems that move the story forward.

What I’m referring to is the kind of shows that erupted in the early 90’s, whose major purpose was to let us indulge in emotional voyeurism. Watching outrageous interactions that let us gasp and gossip about the social, emotional, romantic, or community shredding of others.

These shows have always been the cheap and easy road to elicit audience emotion, and that translated to ratings. Big ratings.

They offered us the ability to indulge in our emotional guilty pleasure openly, without the side glances from others because...well, it’s a show, and somehow that makes it judged to be OK. Never mind that it is real people.

An unintended consequence of reality TV, whose success factor is embarrassment and bad behavior, has been the normalizing of what used to be profoundly unacceptable behaviors.

Jerry Springer, creator and host of the long running Jerry Springer Show, expressed real, unironic, concern that his show had “ruined culture” before his passing in 2023. He demonstrated stratospheric ratings and financial success by barging through the cultural constructs that shape our social health like 6-year-olds playing red rover. A long list of shows ran through that break in the line, and for more than 30 years have been competing for the title of the most outrageous. Jersey Shore, Housewives of…, Survivor, Honey Boo Boo, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, The Swan, Dance Moms, Naked and Afraid, Who’s your Daddy, Kid Nation, Toddlers and Tiaras, the list goes on and on...

These shows discovered the power of airing a different kind of pornography. Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as: “the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.”

I have heard many say, “it’s just a show,” but this view ignores the power that story has. Humans change because of the stories they choose to adopt. Humor, fun, shock, and drama all open our psyches to internalize something in that narrative that will affect us. In healthy storytelling, toxic behaviors have consequences or are put into perspective. Unfortunately for our world entertainment-consuming culture, reality TV often forgoes or warps those consequences to manufacture greater conflict, unfairness, and maximum upset for the participants. Good TV right? No, not if we look at the impact to our culture, ourselves, and our kids.

When we see bullies, narcissists, and bad actors succeed, some small internal part of us starts to register that as truth. Worse still, we humans find alignment through stories, and these shows elevate people demonstrating bad behavior to heroic status. Our culture begins to accept the behavior and normalize it, even if we don’t realize it’s happening.

As evidence, legions of bad-actors have emerged all around the globe behaving badly well beyond reality TV. It has taken decades, but groups of individuals feel little compunction to follow accepted behavioral norms because the social consequences have eroded within the echo-chambers of social media groupings. These norms were intended to keep our societies functioning. Many of these emboldened individuals are now operating openly as bullies, and shockingly large groups of followers have decided that it is not only OK, but heroic. This undermines a society’s will to correct the behavior, and this we are seeing with enormous transgressions having little or no social, political, or legal consequences. What we allow into our storytelling matters.

In kids TV, we work quite hard to be sure to represent consequences for bad behavior. We know from the many educational experts that help guide these shows, that this is critical to building a cooperative, caring, and empathetic adult. Tolerance, inclusivity, cooperation, and empathy are concepts best learned through modeling the behaviors. Unfortunately, kids TV is by far not the only behaviors our kids are observing. These reality shows, and the knock-on behaviors they release, are all around us. We should be concerned about the trajectory of our worldwide societies as this normalizing of terrible behaviors scales up.

I believe, as storytellers, we have remarkable power and ability to make change. It does not mean that we must become idealogues, or that every story needs to have a teaching agenda. I believe that on balance, we have significant work to do to be more responsible in asking ourselves if the stories we are putting into the world achieve some form of human value vs ratings through voyeuristic drama.

Cheers, Kevin