Ramsay hams it up on Hell's Kitchen.
TV Stevie has just finished watching Sopranos season one on DVD and can't believe Tony's own mom tried to whack him. 
Email TV StevieIs it just me, or is reality television openly mocking us at this point?
I don’t know exactly when it happened, and I certainly don’t know how it happened (although I could hazard a few solid guesses), but reality TV has somehow become the modern-day equivalent of what pro wrestling was to me as a kid growing up in the 1980s. It’s in that strange nether-region that hovers somewhere between real and fake, the point at which you’re about 99 percent positive that most of what you’re watching is pure poppycock, yet that leftover one percent is enough to keep you intrigued.
And by “you,” of course, I mean “me.” I wouldn't dare implicate you in this.
From a very early age, before I ever had a chance to experience wrestling from the perspective that it was real, my dad explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that it was all fake. He told me some hackneyed story about meeting (or maybe it was a friend who met him) Gorgeous George, Bobo Brazil or possibly some other wrestler who wrestled in the 1960s, well before I was born. It was at a gas station -- my old man was filling his car...or did he work there? -- and the two rasslers came pulling in.
Apparently, wrestlers like Gorgeous and Bobo like to suck down the wobbly pops, so they were about halfway around the loop-dee-loop by the time they encountered my pops. Loose beers make for loose lips, so they started bragging to my old man – and whoever else was within earshot – about how wrestling was fixed (even though wrestlers were held to a cone of silence called "Kayfabe" back then).
That's the story my dad heard, and that was the one that I heard the very first time I watched wrestling.
Of course, it's a story I was probably told when I was around six-years-old, so there’s a better-than-good chance that I haven’t reported even one accurate detail. And while I could ask the old guy, I have a sneaking suspicion he made this story up, which probably means he couldn’t remember the details himself.
You can rest assured that if either Bobo or George were posthumously charged with a crime, my dad’s testimony about seeing them at a gas station sometime in and around the late-1960s, well, that probably wouldn’t be accepted by a court of law as evidence that could help get them off.
The point is (and yes, even I’m surprised that I have one) that from a very early age, I watched wrestling even though I was 99 percent sure that it was fake (that one percent was the part of me that believed the story was entirely BS). This made me watch it differently than I would have if I was one of those kids who believed it was all real and cried every time a King Kong Bundy-come-lately would squish Hulk Hogan and give him fake broken ribs.
I watched it differently from most kids. I was detached, watching in amazement mostly at the ability of the wrestlers to capture the audience more than enjoying them as performers. I rarely had a rooting interest, but I always had total interest in the spectacle as a whole. And that's the same way I approach reality television now.
The chef's tantrums are beginning to look insincere.
And I’m not even talking about shows like The Hills or any of the other hypnotic slop produced by MTV or VH1 that egregiously flouts the codes and standards of the genre (i.e. at least make it sort of realish). These are the shows that make it perfectly clear to one and all that being labelled as “reality” doesn’t mean anything at all.
The other day, I wrote a column in which I openly questioned whether Corey Haim and Corey Feldman could be despicable enough to lie about being molested as kids to boost the ratings of their own reality show. Yet, now that I think about it some more, even if they were molested, they have obviously chosen to use it as a way to gain an audience for their show. I can’t pass judgment on that one way or another because I don’t know what it’s like to be either of them, but it definitely says something about the state of reality TV that they would use it and that we might not necessarily believe them.
On Tuesday night, I watched the second-to-last episode of Hell’s Kitchen, which I’ve been following all season for no particular reason (I like Gordon Ramsay, but at this point, watching him on Hell’s Kitchen is like watching somebody else do an over-the-top Ramsay impersonation). Kitchen is what you'd technically call a "reality competition" show, which means that there’re a bunch of players competing for a prize, so everything should be on the up-and-up.
But Hell’s Kitchen is quite fake, and is on many levels a scripted show masquerading as a reality show. Ramsay is the star, and everything is set up to have him explode on the players during every episode. You get the distinct impression that if you spoke to one of the competitors after the conclusion of taping, they’d tell you that Ramsay is a lunatic on camera and a very chilled-out dude when the little red light is turned off. So that’s not reality. It’s called acting.
Japanese game shows are plain weird.
Tuesday’s episode also gave the public its first look at Assertiveness Training For the Kitchen, during which Ramsay spent an entire segment of the show teaching the final three of Corey, Christina and Petrozza how to control their kitchens by throwing: 1) tantrums; 2) dishes; and 3) their blood pressure through the roof. I found it somewhat insulting that Hell’s Kitchen would offer such obvious filler content as they stretched what could’ve been the season finale into yet another episode. But while I found it insulting, that's not to say it was surprising.
When I was a kid, wrestling constantly insulted the intelligence of its fans. They assumed that because we enjoyed their product, that meant that we must be idiots. After all, who could enjoy something that’s fake? Wrestling demanded that its audience suspend its disbelief. When a guy came out after two months away with a little face make-up, we were expected to believe that it was a completely different guy. And, while we may not have really believed, we played along because the end result was usually satisfying (as in good over evil, followed by rejoicing).
The line between fact and fiction has become increasingly confusing over the past few years (or, to be truthful, pretty much since I was born). Content is being developed ever more cleverly every year, and we're getting more sophisticated in our viewing habits, too. They think up trickier ways to trick us, and then we teach ourselves how not to be tricked. It’s the eternal game of cat-and-mouse, and since it can often be fun, many of us continue to play it.
To this day, wrestling still prefers to avoid outwardly admitting its fakeness. It has something to do with maintaining the illusion. But while the outcomes of the matches are predetermined, that doesn’t mean that some of the punches aren’t leaving welts, or that a few necks won’t be broken, or that the guys wouldn’t pump themselves full of steroids to land themselves in one of the elusive top money spots, and that there isn’t bad blood flowing in many directions. So, in a way, wrestling is as real as anything else on TV. Now that we know the on-screen product is generally planned, it’s the same (in realness) as The Young & The Restless or King of Queens; straight-up entertainment and nothing more.
A furry Scott Howard was the world's greatest 4' 9" basketball star.
I still watch reality television all the time, and it’s only partly because of this job. While I may not have made the effort to record I Survived a Japanese Game Show (which I could only describe with a word that rhymes with "pre-farted") or Wipeout (which I haven't yet watched), I'd still tune into my fair share of Dog Whisperers or episodes of ‘Til Debt Do Us Part (the truth is out: my vice is Slice). And, of course, Survivor still has exalted status in my household.
But I’ve been around the TV block a few times by now, I’ve talked to people who know people, and I’ve drawn my own conclusions. It’s time for us to be clear about the fact that anything you see on reality television could be as rigged as Michael J. Fox winning the championship for his school in Teen Wolf without calling wolfing out. (As an aside, I’ve always wondered what Scott Howard did after high school. Did he take over his dad’s hardware store? Did he go to college? Did he say, “Screw it! I'm a basketball-playing werewolf and I can go straight to the NBA to make millions?" So many questions…)
Just know that when you’re watching a show like L.A. Ink, there’s every chance in the world that although it might seem that Kat Von D and Pixie have been friends for years, there’s a very solid chance that Pixie was just some random actress who had to go through a series of auditions and signed a contract that she'd shut up about it if anybody pressed her for details.
Wrestling is fake, but at least it has the decency to admit it (and believe me, that’s probably as far as the WWE’s decency can extend). That admittal was what allowed it to get through a huge steroids scandal back in the 1990s. Would reality television be better off if it was equally honest? Probably not. Would the rest of us be better off? It’s hard to say. Would the whole genre need a giant scandal to ever come clean? Would we be better off if it did?
Chances are that we’d be less confused, but also less entertained, if and when the whole reality TV thing blows apart. TV is just a little juicier when you still think there’s a slim chance it could be real. Otherwise, I’d still probably be watching as much wrestling as the six-year-old version of myself.
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