I hope this bursts the American public's bubble
It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s…. another pathetic reality TV show couple.
I was home sick last week with a nasty virus that had me so fatigued that I couldn’t even lift the remote control. Literally. If I could have, I would have turned CNN off and not had to sicken my brain with useless balloon boy information.
I was watching the three hours of live coverage thinking, what’s the big deal? OK, so maybe a boy floated away in a balloon. That sucks, but the sad reality is that it’s just one boy, and his dad shouldn’t have allowed unsupervised access to his grown up meteorological toys. Then the balloon lands and it was reported he wasn’t in the balloon. Did he fall out? I hope not, but if he did, I’m not going to lose sleep over it (honesty can be distasteful). Then the search begins for the missing boy who, as reported, could not have fallen out of the balloon. At that point, I was almost as sick of the boy as I was actually sick (and my toilet can tell you of that B-level horror story), but I still cared more about Calie Anthony in the realm of little kids and mysterious disappearances.
But then Larry King came on and Wolf Blitzer was interviewing the reality TV star parents of the now located, perfectly healthy and annoyingly adorable balloon boy. The boy was asked by the father if he heard his parents calling for him, desperately trying to locate the child that hours earlier could have been fatefully floating to his death. The boy answers his father, “Um hum,” with a voice inflection that an adult would use to imply, “What a dumb question.” The father looks up at the boys mother (who we would later find out he happened to meet in acting school) and she looks back with an oddly familiar parental pattern on her face that suggests, “I can’t believe my six year old just said that.” But the boy didn’t swear, he didn’t say something that sounded dirty, so “What the heck was that look!?!?” I asked myself.
The interview continued, but I couldn’t ignore what in my mind was obvious — it was all a hoax!
Days later, we find out it could have been a hoax. And another 48 hours later we find out felony charges are being filed against the failed-actors-turned-parents-turned-failed-reality-TV-stars.
Now, all I can think is, I hope the American people are happy. I hope their thirst for reality TV drama is quenched. Because they caused this as much as the Henne family’s genetic intolerance to intelligence caused this. As stupid as it is to plan a hoax involving your six year old, a weather balloon and a hope for a reality TV show about your family, it’s equally moronic to plan your nights around watching the reality TV shows that depict so-called normal Americans doing so-called normal American things.
While Nielsen ratings have shown that more Americans are watching TV than ever before (despite this being the age of the Internet), the scariest part is that more than 50 percent of the population admits to having planned their evenings around TV shows. Even worse, an alarming number of the most popular TV shows are of the reality variety. And these shows are far from “reality.”
An MSNBC report (let us pause to reflect on how this news network’s liberal bias could, if at all, affect the validity of this information) back in 2004 covered this topic at length, and they interviewed a critical studies professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/Television, one Todd Boyd. Boyd was quoted as saying, “”We know all these shows are edited and manipulated to create images that look real and sort of exist in real time. But really what we have is a construction. … The whole enterprise of reality television relies on stereotypes. It relies on common stock, easily identifiable images.”
Do Americans realize that this is what happens? If Wolf Blitzer wouldn’t have asked the question he asked, there is a good chance that look between parents wouldn’t have happened and this hoax would have played out just as the Henne family had planned. I hope Americans realize the ridiculous nature of reality TV shows as a result of this incident. Imagine the Henne family as John and Kate plus 8. More importantly, imagine those 8 and the Henne three grown up.
In my untrained opinion of psychology, those children are going to be messed up.
