“Why do you watch this?” my father says, “It’s so…bad.”
I am sitting on the couch watching “America’s Next Top Model.” My father is standing next to me, watching with a pained look on his face.
“I know it’s bad,” I moan, “but I love it!”
Reality TV is probably one of our most loved and most hated genres of television. Reality TV has been called trashy, vapid, mindless, and unrealistic entertainment. Reality TV also gains astronomical ratings. “American Idol,” for example, is one of the highest-rated shows in television history, drawing up to 36 million viewers per week.
Does this mean that our population of TV watchers simply revels in the lowest common denominator of entertainment? Are we all slowly rotting our brains out watching  “Survivor,” “The Bachelor,” “Dancing with the Stars,” and “The Real World”? I think not.
Reality TV is easy to trash-talk and even easier to make fun of. I agree that reality TV is often over-the-top. Simply dismissing reality TV as trashy entertainment, however, is an oversimplification. Reality TV is not reality. We know this. It is exaggerated and overproduced. Yet, it has an alluring uniqueness.
Shows like “House,” and “Desperate Housewives,” and “24” are compelling. But sitcoms and primetime dramas rely on reinventing the same old clichés, and revolve around situations that most of us can’t relate to.  
Take “House,” for example. The show is about a crippled, pill-popping doctor who is brilliant yet psychologically traumatized. Every episode features a rare disease that most of us will never contract. Most of us will also never have the pleasure of being treated by a doctor like Gregory House, the medical equivalent of Sherlock Holmes.
There is nothing wrong with “House.” It’s just that reality TV plays a different role in the television landscape. Reality TV peels back the layers of polite self-censorship and exposes the rawness of the human condition. Reality TV is about people failing and fighting. It is about people winning and losing. It is about people falling in love and making up. It is about people doing the right or the wrong things.
These are the obstacles that we deal with every day. For example, my mother loves “Dog, the Bounty Hunter.” Each episode follows Dog and his fellow bounty hunters (who happen to also be his family) as they catch bail violators, drug dealers, and other fugitives.
My mother is not a bounty hunter, so far as I can tell. Yet she loves this show because it is about a man doing his job, raising his kids, and fighting with his wife. Her favorite part is the heartfelt speech that Dog gave to each person he caught, urging them to pull it together and stop breaking the law.
Sometimes Dog makes a difference, sometimes he doesn’t. “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” like many other reality TV programs, shows us that life is not always pretty, and not always resolved within the space of an episode.
We love watching reality TV because we love watching people like us. Reality TV represents our own struggles and triumphs blown up in Technicolor on our television screens.  So, next time someone complains about “America’s Next Top Model,” or any other reality TV show you love, pay no attention. You know that’s it’s more than just a guilty pleasure.