You can do that on TV or I am not watching with you I am watching at you.

We know their names. Snookie, Paulie D, Kim Kardashian, and Honey Boo-boo. We watch their shows. We give more attention to what they do then our politicians. During last years political part conventions Honey Boo-boo’s show got more rating than the Republican Convention and tied the Democratic Convention when Former President Bill Clinton was speaking. The question I will bring up is why? Why do we give them all of our time and entertainment?

Yesterday my roommate was in control of the TV and I was subjected to a taste of MTV’s Buckwild. The show follows the nine young adults in West Virginia.  The show has been criticized for propagating negative stereotypes. MTV calls it their “Redneck Jersey Shore”. I asked him why he liked the show and you’d have thought I asked him an SAT question. As you can probably tell I don’t have a high opinion of the show but then the same goes for most reality TV.  I take that back. I don’t hate reality TV. I watch shows like The Deadliest Catch because it’s about people doing something. They make a living doing something interesting.

I just can’t get behind shows that I categorize as “Kids Behaving Badly”. I use kids to describe them because let’s be honest if you are a grown woman or man fighting and arguing on Television then you are a child. You can’t tell me that the sheer number of catty-bitch women fighting on TV hasn’t affected us. I had a friend who would do stupid things and his back up explanation was “It’s because I am an asshole”. How many young women see the examples of the “Bad Girls Club” and want to act like them? Sure continue to tell yourself TV doesn’t affect young people. Where did we get the idea to wear our pants around our knees then? Why is every young girl walking around showing her stomachs? We are impressionable beings. We build our personalities and mannerisms on our environments. I am willing to bet that there is a correlation between the upswing in bullying and reality TV. Wait what? Where’d you get that from? Oh I will feed you baby birds. Isn’t the real reason people Honey Boo-boo is to laugh at the family? Isn’t the most popular part of American idol is the auditions when people who have no business singing get in front of the judges? They have turned making fun of people into entertainment. Laugh at this person because they are poor or rednecks or ghetto. Laugh at this person because they can’t sing or dance but they think they can. We now bully people through our TV’s. We’ve turned reality TV into a nationwide game of  “Dinner for Smucks”. Be on TV, act stupid and we’ll give you money. Where is the humanity in that?

The other reason I can’t get behind reality TV is it creates false celebrities. It’s simulated celebrity. Example: Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is famous because he starred in a bunch of movies.  What Tom Cruise does generates his celebrity. He doesn’t wake up thinking ‘What can I do to promote me?’ He wakes up and go makes a movie. The movie and his acting generate the celebrity. Now lets take a reality star: Kim Kardashian. Now I am going ask a simple question. What has she done to be famous? Take your time.  If you said the TV show. WRONG! Kim got her fake celebrity because of two jacked up things. O.J. Simpson and Ray J. You may have forgotten that her father was a lawyer in the case.  She also put out a sex tape that made the rounds on the Internet. She parlayed her porn-cred into getting a show on E network. Kim wakes up every day wondering how she can be more famous.  Don’t believe me…look at how close her marriage was to the media onslaught of the Royal Wedding and when the break up was announced. She is a fake celebrity and real Hollywood knows it. Every year a petition to allow reality TV stars to get a star on the Walk of Fame is forwarded to the people who decide who gets a star. Every year it is denied. You are a fake celebrity. This is how fake your celebrity is. They will give a star on the Walk of Fame to Godzilla, Kermit the Frog and Mickey Mouse but not one to Kim Kardashian. Mickey Mouse hasn't done anything since Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hollywood deems him more of a star than you."