The Mean Truth of Reality Shows: Nastiness Rates

Looking to stand apart from the other broadcast networks, Pax TV came up with the idea of billing itself as being “free”--as in free of “explicit sex, senseless violence and foul language.”

For years, this was the hot topic when it came to the evils of television and what the medium was doing to “harm our children,” a mantra picked up by self-appointed TV watchdogs, cultural warriors in Congress and more than a few critics.

Television’s wavering moral compass became a chronic focus when newspaper critics began analyzing new prime-time programs. Each year there was discussion of some four- or five-letter word that had oozed into the broadcasting lexicon, slipping by what was left of network standards-and-practices departments streamlined by cost-cutting.

A decade ago, for example, the three-week summer cocktail party at which TV critics preview new shows (the 2000 edition, which seemingly runs through November, is currently in progress) turned into a referendum on the propriety of a young girl yelling “You suck!” at her brother in the CBS sitcom “Uncle Buck,” scheduled at 8 p.m., when kids are still apt to be up and watching. Irate questions over this verbal indiscretion persisted until you half expected fed-up producers and executives to deliver the offending line as their response to critics.

While picking at such weeds, TV watchdogs have largely overlooked a more insidious fungus--one that has spread across the media landscape and risks doing more harm than a thousand four-letter words or cartoonish kicks on “Xena: Warrior Princess.”

What has been missed, perhaps because it doesn’t easily translate into a broadcast-friendly sound byte or stump political speech, is the general nastiness that has crept into popular entertainment--the idea it is great fun to watch unpleasant things happen to ordinary people.

The latest embodiment of this trend is CBS’ “Big Brother,” which on July 13 served up a classic demonstration of the distasteful intrusions by TV producers that have come to represent the status quo.

The series, as you may have heard, has isolated and monitored 10 people in a specially constructed house in Studio City (punishment enough, one would think, given summer temperatures in the Valley). One of the contestants has talked repeatedly about her loveless marriage, and her clearly reluctant husband was brought on to bare all about his reaction to those comments.

CBS brought in an “expert” to try cloaking this as some sort of broader look at relationships, but it was hard not to think of the couple’s teenage children, who were profiled along with them a week earlier. What great fun this exposure will no doubt be for those kids when they return to school.

Admittedly, none of this is entirely new. Talk shows in the late-night and daytime hours have resorted to such tactics for years. Yet the creep of this soul-numbing trend into prime time--where the premium dramas are “The West Wing” and “The Practice,” not “General Hospital” and “Days of Our Lives”--provides a symbol of where the medium has gone and may do more to make society a mean-spirited and hostile place than exposing kids to any combination of words they could hear on practically any schoolyard.

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Defenders of the genre say participants in these reality programs volunteered for scrutiny and must accept a degree of responsibility for that choice. To simply lay the blame on them, however, is to underestimate the intoxicating and addictive nature of celebrity in our culture.

In his 1998 book “Life: the Movie--How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” Neal Gabler explores in part how the appetite for celebrities has consumed the media and society. Regarding the new admission fee to the celebrity club, he suggests, “One didn’t necessarily need any talent to attain it. All one really needed was the sanctification of the television camera.”

Gabler uses several memorable examples of the absurd ways in which fame can be fleetingly achieved, including the fan who dove out of the stands trying to catch a ball during a “Monday Night Football” telecast. The young pass-catcher wound up landing an appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman,” illustrating the sort of Faustian bargain these reality shows offer: Catch the ball and wind up famous. Of course, you take a chance on missing the ball and cracking your head open on the pavement below, but hey, no guts, no glory.

As Gabler puts it, “Some people were willing to do almost anything to get to the other side of the glass for their moment of beatification, and the media were just as eager to grant it.”

Networks can always defend such excess, as CBS has, by reminding us the current TV universe contains hundreds of channels. If people don’t like it, the common refrain goes, nothing sends that message better than flipping to another of those numerous viewing options.

Even those of us inclined to join this libertarian free-market chant, however, found it easier advocating the freedom to depict realistic language or sexuality in the service of well-crafted drama or comedy--from “NYPD Blue” to “Friends,” both targets of criticism for relaxing standards--than the right to manipulate reality using ordinary people as pawns. Assuming that the goal of reaching adults age 18 to 49 requires sex, violence and foul language or potentially screwing up people’s lives, suddenly the former doesn’t look so bad.

Critics can obviously lament why there must be muck of any kind, why we can’t just have nice programs like we used to--the equivalent of “The Andy Griffith Show” in color. The answer, of course, is that with a few exceptions, rampant kindness is seldom as interesting as scheming, sleeping around and occasionally seeing someone righteously kick a little butt. Promoting family values only works for TV executives if families give the programs value by tuning in.

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So when it comes down to pushing the envelope of taste, tawdry serials and loutish sitcoms--where the situations are made up and nothing gets hurt except perhaps the reputations of the actors and producers--appears infinitely preferable to an exercise such as “Big Brother” that compels some poor schmo to address embarrassing spousal allegations under a contrived media spotlight. There is no enlightenment here, only exploitation--a “reality” manufactured at the expense of a man and his children.

In short, if “Big Brother” and the rest of its extended programming family is the present antidote for what ails network television, then, by all means, bring back “Uncle Buck.”

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Brian Lowry’s column usually appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.