What do you see when women volunteer to be made over, dressed, styled or surgically enhanced to be “hot” on TV?
What do you see when a bevy of single women fight over a bachelor they’ve never met, competing in front of multiple cameras for a ring from the handsome prince?
When Jennifer Pozner eyes reality TV, she doesn’t see simple time-wasters or guilty pleasures. She sees a retrograde political force, “a pop-cultural backlash against women’s rights and social progress.”
Pozner, a feminist media critic and founder/director of Women in Media and News, has written an entertaining and sharp-eyed takedown of the form, titled “Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV” (Seal Press, $16.95).
With extensive examples from the big reality shows of the 2000s, she unpacks the political and commercial agendas behind the genre.
Clearly, Pozner understands the commercial drive behind the “unscripted” shows. She notes the importance of product placement or embedded advertising to networks desperate to find new revenue streams as ratings decline.
She gets the value to networks of cheaper programming in a cost-cutting era and the financial reasons network executives are more likely to let a low-rated reality show stay on the air while canceling a low-rated but intelligent drama.
She knows these shows are intentionally cast with an eye toward explosive bad behaviors. She knows producers regularly incite arguments and keep the participants liquored up and away from family to yield a combustible mix. And she is familiar with the poetic license applied in the editing room, where quotes are rearranged and timelines manipulated. While acknowledging the basics of the business, her interest is the serious and repressive messages inherent in the supposedly lightweight shows. She defines them this way:
• Women are catty, manipulative and not to be trusted, especially by other women, as depicted by “Joe Millionaire,” “Top Model,” “The Bachelor” and the “Real Housewives” franchises.
• Women are intellectually inferior, incompetent at work and at home.
• And women are gold diggers. She points to “For Love or Money,” “Flavor of Love,” “The Simple Life” and “What Not to Wear” portraying women as calculating dimwits.
Such spectacles could never draw millions of fans and enjoy lucrative runs if there weren’t an established, abiding prejudice in our culture, Pozner concludes.
“These shows frame their narratives in ways that both play to and reinforce deeply ingrained societal biases about women and men, love and beauty, race and class, consumption and happiness in America,” she writes.
What can we do about the perpetuation of these “gendered myths”? Pozner offers tips on media literacy.
Heads up, college media students! She’s even concocted drinking games: Take a sip when fights seem rehearsed on “The Kardashians.” Take sip when a thin girl calls herself fat or ugly on “America’s Next Top Model.” Take a sip during “The Bachelor” when a voice-over narrator promises “the claws will come out” or “hearts will be broken.” And take a shot during “Real Housewives” when a woman is especially clueless about money.
Unfortunately, Pozner’s view doesn’t allow much differentiation between the trashiest reality-TV dating shows and the more high-minded contests that emphasize talent and ingenuity. There’s a huge difference between a cooking, singing or fashion-design contest and the obnoxious living-in-a-house-bickering-and-boozing spectacles.
It’s unfair to lump together the contrived and insidious “Top Model”/”Bachelor” beauty/dating shows with actual talent contests like “Project Runway” and “Top Chef.” The “reality TV” category covers many types, from admirable to revolting.
While her focus is media through a feminist lens, Pozner sometimes lets her politics get in the way of good judgment. While she correctly laments that the rise of reality TV has diminished the number of slots available to scripted dramas and made it tougher for new dramas to survive, she puts feminist theory ahead of pragmatism when she mourns the cancellation of Sally Field’s “The Court,” about a female Supreme Court justice, after just three episodes; or Geena Davis’ “Commander in Chief” after just one season.
She overlooks the fact that those were not great shows. (Look how well Julianna Margulies and “The Good Wife” are doing.)
While traces of bitterness occasionally mar her obvious intelligence and humor, Pozner has delivered a savvy, not-too-academic analysis of a form that’s not a just fad — and one that’s eating up more and more of the TV schedule.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
