Yay. More Reality TV. Great.

Kris Roley
4 min readJul 16, 2023
Photo by 傅甬 华 on Unsplash

This may not be a very popular take, but what the hell. I think there are two kinds of reality TV. There’s one that takes you through a process that has a tangible result at the end. The other kind is trash tv that manufactures conflict for the effect. Laughs, Screams, WTFs, whatever it is. You might have guessed that I’ll watch the former but hate the latter. It wasn’t always the case; for example, I watched Gene Simmons’s Family Jewels. I’m sure I watched other stuff, but so much of it is so forgettable…I’ve forgotten it. I have never watched a Kardashian do anything, I have no interest in Real Housewives of Insert city here, I could care less about your love before, during, or after lockup, I just don’t care. About the only things you can count on in 2023 on TV are a Law and Order, an NCIS, a Chicago, and somebody upending a table and going after someone nails first because they…well, I assume a producer told them to.

I mean, we all know the drill at this point, yes? Reality TV is not real. Maybe it was at one point that I was naive and gullible in my “When people stop being polite and start getting real” youth. I thought The Real World NY and LA were legit. I thought Survivor season 1 was legit. Of course, living here in Virginia Beach, I had to root for Rudy the retired Navy Seal. But after that, and before Gene Simmons, certainly, by the time Gene Simmons came around, Reality TV started…

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