Trash TV Tuesday

I may get judged for this post but oh well. 

Reality TV has been one of my "guilty pleasures" since I was in Junior High. The first reality TV show I remember watching is Laguna Beach on MTV. I didn't actually have cable at my house, but I would watch it at my friends house..which is also where I discovered it. This show was about teenagers that were in high school that lived in Laguna Beach, California. Laguna Beach was an area of very well off individuals, so the majority of the teenagers parents were well off except for a few so they were spoiled. I think my friends and I liked this show because they were high schoolers and they looked cool to us. It's funny because when I originally watched this show I completely believed that it was all real. I decided to re-watch the series, (all 3 seasons) on Netflix and had never really thought about the possibility that any of it was scripted or pre-planned. Once I began re-watching it, it became obvious that some things were scripted...but oddly enough I still enjoyed the show at the age of 20.

Also in high school when Jersey Shore came out, my friends and I had a tradition every Thursday that we called Jersday Thursday. Thursday's were the night that each new episode came out and we would all go out to eat and then go back to one of my friends' house to watch the new episode. I still treasure those memories although the show was very dumb, and we knew it was but we always got a good laugh and had a great time.

While I was and am still a fan of those reality TV shows, that does NOT mean I like all of them or all aspects of them. I used to enjoy watching TLC until they started showing reality shows like Honey Boo Boo, 19 Kids and Counting, Breaking Amish, the Gypsy shows....etc. Now I rarely watch the channel. Similar to what we discussed in class today, I do not agree with shows that are created to poke fun at people that are "different" or lower class...which seem to be a lot of TLC's targets for reality shows. I don't find shows like Honey Boo Boo humorous because they are show casing a young girl to be made fun of by society and I doubt she even understands that. She only understands that people think she is funny and she gets attention from acting a certain way.

My choice of reality shows now are the ones on HGTV, and frankly it really doesn't matter if those are scripted or planned to me. The only affect it has on me is that I now have a bigger wish list when I can afford my own house, but I also know the reality that some of the things I now "want" are things that are very expensive and not always necessities. While I understand the reality of me actually owning a home similar to the ones on HGTV, I fear that some people do not and then will run themselves into a pile of debt trying to obtain the dream they got from TV.

I guess the idea I'm trying to get across is that I may like some reality TV shows, but that does not mean I like them all. Also, because I enjoy some reality TV shows that doesn't make me an awful person. Reality tv shows can be relaxing in the aspect that you don't have to really think when you watch them, you can just simply watch them. I think that if people like certain reality TV shows that may say something about them, but they shouldn't be judged for that necessarily.