If this were merely another teenage soap, we’d shake our heads and graze on. But Fox Broadcasting’s “Yearbook,” which premieres March 7, is actually the latest twist - and twisted is how some may regard it - on TV’s reality trip. Taped at Glenbard West High School in suburban Chicago, the weekly series follows a group of Glenbard seniors through the ups and downers of their final year. It’s an improbable concept, all right, but no more so than the genre that spawned it. Squeezed by soaring production costs and shrinking ad revenues, the four networks are all reaching for the same cure: low-budget, high-profit series featuring almost every conceivable form of real-life misery. Now here’s another reality. The genre’s shameless exploitation of its subjects’ ordeals, as well as its viewers’ worst voyeuristic instincts, is beginning to make some of us feel real queasy. Mother was right. It’s rude to gawk especially at someone else’s dirty laundry.
None of that, though, has slowed the scramble to package human misfortune as home entertainment. By this season’s end, we’ll have witnessed the debuts of “Top Cops” (Real police! Real perpetrators!), “TrialWatch” (Real defendants! Real courtrooms!), “Emergency” (Real doctors! Real emergency rooms!), “On Scene: Emergency Response” (Real paramedics! Real pain!), “True Detectives” (Real sleuths! Real slimes!) and “American Detective” (ibid.). Now add the shows that arrived earlier - “Cops,” “Rescue 911,” “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries” - and you’re looking at a trend that just may swallow television.
There’s little mystery to the genre’s audience appeal. Like “An American Family,” the 1973 PBS documentary that probably started it all (remember those messed-up Louds?), such series slam home raw, spontaneous emotions in a way no fictional show can rival. CBS’s “Rescue 911” let us eavesdrop on a chillingly agonized phone conversation between a neophyte police dispatcher and a gunman holding an old woman hostage. Fox’s “Cops” sometimes gets to the scene while a crime is still unfolding. In one episode we watched an officer flush a gunman out of a closet; in another, a drug dealer escaped on camera. “At its best, ‘Cops’ is an existential parable, raising legal, moral and ethical issues,” proclaims John Langley, the show’s executive producer. “At worst, we go a little too far.”
Actually, these shows raise such issues precisely because they go as far as they do. Either before or after their cameras roll, the producers try to secure signed releases from their subjects agreeing to appear on screen. The fact that so many comply, no matter how indecently they’re being exposed, offers one more depressing proof that getting on TV has become our strongest biological urge. But what’s legal isn’t necessarily ethical. In the first episode of ABC’s upcoming “American Detective,” the 3-year-old son of a cocaine dealer bursts into tears as police break into his home and handcuff his father. Though the father subsequently agreed to the telecasting of his arrest, the producers’ intention to exploit the boy’s anguish by disseminating it nationwide seems to border on child abuse. “I can’t sit here and defend it entirely,” allows Paul Stojanovich, the show’s creator.
The people behind “Yearbook” also got permission from the parents of the students they monitored. That, however, hardly absolves them of using the teenagers’ natural videophilia in ways that could haunt them in later life. Why would a 17-year-old girl announce to America that she’s an unwed mother? “Because these kids watch so much television,” responds “Yearbook” coexecutive producer Charles Bangert, “things that might bother our generation don’t bother them at all. They’re much more open about their lives.” Maybe so, but Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman believes that the Donnas and Tims should have been provided with professional counseling about how the show might harmfully affect them. “The possibility of being on camera is very seductive,” she says, “and high-school seniors are a very vulnerable group.”
The genre’s worst offenders are those that pander to our appetite for gore. Listen to a Kentucky policewoman describe being shot by an intruder for CBS’s “Top Cops”: “I felt the bullet go over the roof of my mouth like a hot poker. I could taste the gunpowder.” (Later, her son added his own charmingly vivid recollection: “I thought my Mom had no face.”) Or tune in that special edition of Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted,” the one devoted entirely to men who brutally murdered their girlfriends. (We found the re-enactment of the machete hacking especially striking.) Some shows, generally those that proclaim the most humanitarian intentions, give themselves away in their promos. To segue into a segment about a child-custody case, NBC’s “TrialWatch” flashed this announcement “Next: Child Sacrifice.”
What all of this is doing to the national psyche can, mercifully enough, only be imagined. Granted, the chance to observe how real crimefighters and rescue workers operate has its educational value. “I try to capture the fear in it,” says Dave Forman, executive producer of the syndicated “On Scene: Emergency Response.” “I try to make the audience feel like they just jumped off the fire engine or out of the helicopter.” Press Forman for a single-word definition of the reality genre’s allure, however, and he candidly replies: “Voyeurism.” Dan Gingold, a University of Southern California journalism professor, agrees. “It’s titillating,” he says. “For some strange reason, people are fascinated with seeing victims, people who have been brutalized in some way. And, of course, television is the perfect, private place to give vent to that kind of thing.”
In the end, and even lucrative TV trends end eventually, reality programming’s most lamentable imprint may be its most subtle. Some students of the tube call it the “blur effect.” As the boundary between information and entertainment breaks down, as television pumps out an undemarcated flow of fact-based fictions and fictionalized facts, viewers, in Gingold’s words, “are having a harder time determining what’s real life and what’s somebody’s imagination. The result is that they’re being desensitized to reality.” Of course, you can’t blame all of that on the merchants of voyeur-vid. In a scene from a rough cut of “American Detective” - understandably excised from the final version - the wife of the coke dealer getting busted turns on the cameraman and snaps: “What the hell are you doing with that?” A good question, but here’s a better one. What are we doing watching stuff like this?
