Robin showed up to work this morning and said that he saw a crew filming what is probably going to turn into the second season of Ruby on the north side of Forsyth Park today. He said that they had a trailer set up for her where she could wait while they were setting up the shots. He described it as "a horse trailer with a garage door." (Ouch.)
I'm not so naive as to believe that reality TV has ever had too much "reality" in the equation, and besides the first couple seasons of Top Chef (it's fallen off lately), I've never really gotten into any of these series. But come on. Ruby Gettinger may not be a trained actress, but she gets paid, and I don't know a single person who has a trailer where they can go grab a bottle of water while their waiting for the light to be right, so can we still call this "reality?"
Furthermore, I don't know if you've ever seen the opening credits, but there's a shot of Ruby walking through the park and a lady passes her by and then does a double take, and glances at her back over her shoulder. Now we're probably supposed to infer that Ruby's weight is so shocking (480lbs when the show started), that people are constantly shocked by her...well, even if that lady wasn't just stopping to see why there was a camera crew in the middle of the park...it turns out that the sensibly sized blonde is one of the show's producers - so they couldn't even avoid setting up what would probably be a pretty easy shot to get.
I probably just shouldn't care, but I started to take issue when the failed trust exercise of low-cost entertainment started to effect the english language—when Court TV folded (the post-'95 OJ Trial legal-frenzy could only last so long) and was replaced by Tru TV. I haven't seen Tru TV, but I guess it's the network equivalent of watching COPS 24-hours a day with a couple of blooper shows thrown in to lighten the mood every now and then. It's all re-packaged raw footage...things captured in "reality." Unfortunately, Reality TV had caused such a mistrust of the term "reality" among the average person that they felt it necessary to create a new word, "Actuality," to describe their programming. "Not Reality. Actuality." That's their tagline.
When something so blatantly surreal as reality television has infiltrated culture to the degree that it has, so much so that what used to be a pretty easy to understand word, reality, is rendered meaningless, then we need to take action. Let's just call it television, because it's starting to mess up my reality.
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