The Odd Job
Filing for Moral Bankruptcy
Mark my words: One day we all will be forced to atone for the sins committed on reality TV shows.
Or perhaps we already have. Maybe this era of the pandemic, where the only palatable entertainment is anything that takes up very little brain space, is some form of penance.
Don’t get me wrong, I love trash TV. I’ve been subsisting on it for months. But nothing makes you question your TV binging habits more than seeing a reality show contestant throw on a straw hat and rub Nutella on her face to mock her Black ex-boyfriend. In the year 2012.
It’s haunting to consider the potential depravity of what doesn’t make it to air. And based on what Claire Harris went through during her short stint as a reality TV producer, the lengths of the industry’s moral bankruptcy goes deeper than we may care to believe.
When Harris first sent me her story last year, she pitched it as “a glimpse into the murky depths of a television executive’s soul.” She was hired to work on a show that followed a group of young Amish people who fled from their community and were trying to make it out on their own. But when “cast members” failed to deliver in providing juicy footage on their own, the production crew would do everything they could to gin up the drama.
What happened behind-the-scenes was far more interesting than anything that took place while the cameras were rolling. The show’s executives fired a female producer for sleeping with one of the ex-Amish teens. She later packed up her Hollywood life and, I was told in whispers and stifled giggles, moved into his trailer in Missouri. We couldn’t show this because it would have been too hard to explain her sudden appearance as a character.
Instead, we manufactured drama. We pushed these Amish youths to encourage their other Amish friends to run away from their families. Then, we provided them with cars and filmed them going to steal away their friends in the dead of night. With a little fudging of dates of birth, we could make them legally consenting adults who didn’t need parental permission to appear on national television.
I won’t spoil the end of Harris’ story and what happened after one of the stars on the show suffered a terrible accident. But re-reading it now might just be enough to reconsider relying on reality TV for pandemic escapism.
