TV audiences worldwide are interested in seeing people squirm, fight, fall in love and break down, just like audiences everywhere always have, from disciples of the cheapest soap opera to Shakespeare buffs. Now, producers of TV pulp need to keep developing new angles to engage increasingly sardonic, pop-psychologically savvy audiences. The flimsiest premise will do, especially if the formula includes watching other people jump through emotional hoops. Hence, the reality show format, with its vaguely psychological pretext of setting up 'experiments' by which audiences can witness revealing demonstrations of real human behaviour in unlikely but camera-friendly locales.
Reality shows share some of the psychological features of pulp fiction, except page-turners demand active reading and imagining. They are shallow skits compared with the personality cults that drive sitcoms. They lack the expertise and discipline of a football game and have none of the content of a news broadcast or documentary. In fact, they spend the minimum time on informing the audience about anything outside the close study of flash-in-the-pan human emotions - the feistier and sexier the better.
But isn't it all harmless fun? Well, let's look at the psychology of watching 'reality': the first curiosity, of course, is that nothing on television is remotely real. You have to go to internet livecams to find approximations of that, in all its boring detail. The situations in reality shows are meticulously prearranged. It would be quite straightforward for an organisational psychologist to help profile candidates to make up harmonious groups. But that is the last thing producers want. Instead, they choose a mix of participants that will attract and repulse viewers, arouse their sympathy or simply to maximise the chances that fur will fly.
Participants either understand the implicit rules involved in being chosen and act accordingly - that is in an unnaturally, one-dimensional, rather dramatic way. Or careful editing means they are cast in a particular role, like it or not. The participants' payoff for possible character assassination is the direct or indirect benefits to the ego and bank balance that television exposure can bring.
Reality shows are not intended to be uplifting, of course. They are entertaining and slightly addictive - we know they are trash. But what makes them so? Is it because they are voyeuristic, as many critics claim? Not in the least. For one thing, a real peeping tom decides when and what he (rarely she) clandestinely watches and the activity depends on the victim's ignorance that she (seldom he) is being watched. The television version provides neither. Instead it serves up a very different sort of satisfaction. Or more accurately, it stimulates an appetite for safely stage-managed naughtiness or - more often - the visual equivalent of gossip, which it then goes on to only partially satisfy.
That is why millions go on watching. So, if they are not voyeuristic, are they so bad?