I’m Melting
It’s that medication again (oddly, it makes me drowsy, but keeps me from sleeping at night). So here’s an article I published several months ago, and may elaborate on later (but not today).
Unacknowledged. Quiet. Subtle. There is a revolution happening on cable television.
Discussions of out-of-touch network television producers and Hollywood moguls abound, but while housewives get more desperate and police get more anti-law enforcement and DAs get more pro-criminal on the big screen and network television, there is a growing number of television shows that portray real people, and do so without the condescension the networks and Hollywood would find necessary.
John Nolte, AKA Dirty Harry, touched on this last week, in Reality TV: The Return of the Working Class Hero.
Today, there are few channels out of our hundred-plus where at some time during the day there isn’t some barely-was/has-been shamelessly contriving melodrama — or some off the street never-was, desperate for the validity they are in fact special doing the same. But out of all this — Jerry-Springering-without-the-live-audience — has come something a little wonderful.
The return of the working class hero.
God bless America, the popular new wave of reality shows — and some of the highest rated on cable — have nothing to do with vaguely familiar botoxed faces or the everyday people who ape them. Instead, we’re watching men and women comfortable in their own skin, ingenious at what they do, and unafraid of the hard, challenging work that makes our world go round. They catch the fish, drive the trucks, load the docks, build, create, and craft, often in environments and conditions so harsh they seem like superheroes.
But in a way they are. Who else has the stamina for twenty hour shifts in the freezing cold with waves crashing aboard and heavy equipment whizzing dangerously past? Who else possesses the bravery to drive an eighteen-wheeler over frozen water? They adapt, they overcome, and with calloused hands and nimble minds they gut-check through every working day doing the dirty jobs the rest of us won’t.
And we watch. We marvel at the men populating Ice Road Truckers, The Deadliest Catch, Dirty Jobs, and American Chopper. Men who cuss and smoke cigarettes and lose their tempers and get the job done. We marvel at the creativity that gets them through, and we marvel at those fascinating six minute segments taking us into the dit-dit of How It’s Made. We marvel enough that every new season brings another guy just doing what he does so well. This year it was exterminators. Like eating cotton candy or slowing to pick up the grisly details of a car crash, watching the fame-addicted humiliate themselves may well fascinate, but it doesn’t feel very good inside. But watching the people who take enormous pride in the difficult work they do makes this the healthiest television trend since Fox News upended the liberal media monopoly.
While the cultural divide grew as wide as flyover country between those who create television and those who watch it, we’ve seen the working class pretty much relegated to buffoonish sitcom husbands; balding, heavyset men, married to impossibly lovely wives who bubble with love but also deliver sharp zingers that manifest the contempt she (and the show’s creators) have for their mate’s humble station in life. Gone are the lunch bucket heroes. They’ve long been replaced by lawyers, doctors, perfectly tailored detectives, and Manhattan lofted friends.
But something good is happening on the higher-numbered channels where the nobility of hard work plays out in such a fascinating way that The Deadliest Catch has been “synergized” into a video game and a family of motorcycle builders are treated like movie stars by movie stars. Somewhere along the line, narcissism on parade took a back seat to the virtues of the men in flannel. Yes, it’s our dads, uncles, and neighbors.
It’s an excellent article, but I would gently suggest that John missed the larger picture. It’s larger than class. It’s a values revolution.
It has crept up so softly that it became perceptible only recently, yet it’s been growing for several years. I think I was first aware of it, even though I watched many of these shows, when I first saw Taste of America on the Travel Channel — well, more to the point, the idiot host, one Mark DeCarlo.
I had been addicted to Dirty Jobs for quite some time when I first saw DeCarlo, and the contrast between him and Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs and the narrator of Deadliest Catch, was striking. Mike Rowe is humorous, but shows the men and women on his show the highest respect. DeCarlo never misses a chance to sneer at his guests.
But this began before Dirty Jobs.
There’s A&E’s Dog the Bounty Hunter. Dog (Duane Chapman) is an ex-con, convicted of manslaughter, who got out of prison and turned his life around. He took charge of his out-of-control kids, turned them around, and now they work with him to bring the bad guys in. But it’s not just that. Dog and his family pray on television.
Yes, you read that right.
There’s a whole list of these shows, some of them the most popular shows on cable. Deadliest Catch follows crab boats in the Bering Sea, and takes reality television to its extreme, as this writeup in the NYT notes:
Of all the reality shows, “Deadliest Catch” is by far the realest; people have actually died on it. In the first season one of the featured boats, the Big Valley — top-heavy with stacked pots — wallowed and then sank, drowning all but one of its crew.
Actually, in its four seasons, several boats have capsized, and more than one episode has been dedicated to the men who lost their lives during filming. And this is tangential, but of all the shows on television, Deadliest Catch surely has the most breathtaking footage. (By the way, if you have never seen it, I encourage you to click the link and read the article.)
Or there’s the A&E franchise’s new phenomenon, Ice Road Truckers. Not unlike Deadliest Catch, camera men follow their subjects, the men who drive trucks on arctic ice up near Yellowknife. It’s first episode had 3.2 million viewers; the finale, 5 million. That’s a lot of viewers for a cable television show.
And many of these shows cover very politically incorrect material. There’s Ax Men, a show about loggers in the northwest (but what about the spotted sparrow!) There’s Black Gold, about oil rig workers in Texas (that show did manage to get a lot of idiotic, Marxist hand wringing from a mouthbreather in the NYT).
But this revolution isn’t confined to this genre. Cops has been around for years, but the message is muddled. Lately, there has been an explosion of law enforcement reality shows, with very clear messages, and not liberal hand wringing messages, either.
There is DEA, which follows a DEA task force in Detroit. Spike TV just started airing Real Vice Cops Uncut.
These aren’t shows with an overt political message, but they do have a clear social message. They are utterly without moral equivalence. The police are the good guys, and the whores, the pimps, the crack junkies, the murderers, and the rapists are the bad guys. There is no Detective Munch spouting idiotic left-wing talking points.
And these shows share more than just their law and order focus with Dog the Bounty Hunter. The police pray before they got out on a bust, and it’s shown on television. Without any sneering commentary.
This revolution is rearing its head in surprising places. On the last season of Ultimate Fighter, Spike’s number one hit show, where fighters vie for a contract with the UFC, one of the finalists got drunk, kicked out a car window, and hit on a couple of women in a bar. Dana White, the CEO of UFC, kicked him off the show because he didn’t want anybody like that representing his organization. And there are UFC fighters who pray — and are shown praying — before they fight.
I’m not saying that all of these shows portray religious people. There’s a lot of dialogue bleeped out on the rawest of these shows, like Deadliest Catch. But values encompass a lot more than how much one curses, and even if we’d rather the characters cursed less, we can only admire them for working the jobs they do — and appreciate cable for showing them as they are, with no sneering editorializing. That’s why this is larger than just showing working class people. It’s a values revolution.
While network TV gets more and more “urban sophisticated,” cable is showing more and more “flyover country” people, and in three dimensions. What’s encouraging is that these unashamedly “unsophisticated” shows are so popular.
Certainly, cable airs more than its share of “sophisticated” shows. There’s the moronic Project Runway, where designers compete against one another, and frequently talk about how stupid Americans are (because they don’t wear those godawful things they make, if course). And there are the network reality shows that won’t die, the ones that have nothing to do with reality: Survivor, where a bunch of people play Lord of the Flies on an island, or Big Brother, where we watch a bunch of people living together in a house. But shows like these aren’t changing the face of cable TV.
The “flyover country” reality shows are.
rightwingprof :: Jan.08.2009 :: TV/Movies, Conservatism :: No Comments »
