Idiot Box: The renaissance of reality TV

Earlier this week, I kept running into news about the all-important story of the week: Gene Simmons is getting married. Well, not actually—apparently the ceremony already happened on October 1. But on Monday and Tuesday, Simmons’s wedding was televised in a two-night special edition of his reality show, Gene Simmons Family Jewels.
How many people, outside of the Kiss bassist’s family and friends, do you think would give any number of shits that he’s getting married if he didn’t have his own show? My guess is not that many.
And that is the root of the evil that is celebrity reality shows. The first of these shows, or at least the first to gain notoriety, was MTV’s The Osbournes, which placed cameras in the home of Ozzy Osbourne and his family. The family was funny—an aged, half-coherent former frontman and his pink-haired daughter having loud, bleeped-out, British conversations was nothing short of hilarious. The Osbourne crew was eccentric, uninhibited, and loaded with money, and American audiences loved their ridiculousness. The show got the highest ratings MTV had ever seen and even won an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program in 2002.
Presumably, the Ozzy formula—old rock star plus cameras equals big bucks—was what A&E had in mind when they started Family Jewels. But if you actually watch the show (and given that it’s been on for an unfathomable six seasons, some people out there must), it’s clear that Gene is no Ozzy. He’s a regular guy with no accent and a pretty regular family, and the gang’s antics on the show are obviously contrived by the producers.
Sadly, Simmons isn’t the only quasi-famous person with a show that tries its hardest to make him look interesting. The TV lineups of recent years have been rife with shows featuring celebrities, with their “wacky” families and the “crazy” lives they are allowed to lead because of their large amounts of disposable income.
But there’s a catch—or rather, a catch-22. Think for a second about Paris Hilton, the veritable reality TV queen of the 2000s. Why was she famous? Because of The Simple Life. But why would they pick her to be on The Simple Life if she wasn’t famous?
It’s the same thing with Gene Simmons. Nobody cared about him until he had a show, but he has a show because, presumably, there was an audience out there that would care about him. I have only one explanation for why such shows get on the air, and stay on the air—they’re cheap. Take one quasi-celebrity or barely-still-kicking has-been, give them and their family a small camera crew and a few thousand bucks per episode, and voila, reality TV. If someone on the show is particularly attractive, insane, or makes a sex tape, your ratings will go up, and you can pay your cast of “real” characters more money, effectively encouraging them to be even more ridiculous and make the show even more successful. It won’t win Emmys, but nobody’s trying to be The Amazing Race here.
Of course, every rule has an exception, and as much as I hate this breed of show, there’s one TV personality it has birthed whom I consider a gift from the gods of the airwaves—Flavor Flav. He appeared in a whopping five shows on VH1, including three seasons of his incomparable and incomprehensible dating competition Flavor of Love. And right before he started on The Surreal Life, his first show, he was scalping tickets outside Yankee Stadium. Although, to be honest, a show about Flavor Flav scalping tickets would have been just as entertaining as watching him court girls.