While watching Through A Blue Lens in class this week, I was reminded of other “real life” TV shows about addiction I had seen, specifically TLC’s My Strange Addiction and A&E’s Intervention. While Intervention focuses on drug and/or alcohol dependence, My Strange Addiction has all sorts of different addict profiles, including a woman who is addicted to eating her deceased husband’s ashes and a 33 year old man who spent $100,000 to “perfect his Justin Bieber look.” With the rise in reality television that seems to have occurred in recent years, I question the whether certain shows accurately portray and depict the different narratives and lives of the people on the show.

I’ll admit it: I loved watching Laguna Beach and The Hills when I was in high school. LC was my girl. And although a part of me believed that everything on the show was real, I also sort of knew that most of it wasn’t. Although claiming to show the “real” lives of the people on the show, there was much controversy around what was real and what was fake. After the show ended, a girl who had been on The Hills, Kristin Cavallari, revealed that she had had “fake relationships and fake fights on The Hills. What does this say about other reality tv shows? How does this portray our society? In fact, how do reality shows in general portray our society? When I was in the tenth or eleventh grade, Jersey Shore was a big deal in my high school- people thought “It’s so dumb, it’s funny” and continued to watch it. When MTV held a season in Italy, I thought “Oh god, this is how Italians are going to view all Americans.” As it continued, I realized that future generations might view this one the way that the show and  other reality shows portray our society today.

Some long-standing reality shows, like MTV’s (actually) unscripted The Real World are on the verge of ending, however. Although in its 29 season which is currently being broadcast, viewer numbers have dropped drastically, perhaps making this the last season of the show. What used to be popular because of the truth and ‘real-life drama’ that came with 7 young adults living together is no longer; it is shows like Here Comes Honey Booboo and Duck Dynasty which feature more ‘wholesome American families.’ However, isn’t it interesting that the self-proclaimed redneck families in Duck Dynasty used to have an entirely different image, one that does not fit the brand of their show at all? Where’s the reality in that?

It can be said that people watch a lot of reality television, even if they claim it is their guilty pleasure. The way the lives of people on the show are portrayed often do not accurately depict who they are or how their lives are, though some do. In a way, I believe that these shows have become a narrative of our society today. If they are archived and later found and researched, this is the way future generations may view the era of the early 21st century. Perhaps scholarly articles will be written about the rise of the Kardashians or the fall of the Gosselins (you know, Jon and Kate Plus 8). I just hope that in the future, there will be more interest in the real problems of today than in today’s interest in reality television.