Since the suicide of Russell Armstrong, one of the husbands featured on Bravo’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the blogosphere has been full of critics lamenting that reality television had at last gone too far and that it must have been the 24/7 pressure cooker of the show that finally drove him over the edge. Some hand-wringing pundits even called for networks to start psychologically screening and counseling potential contestants and cast members to ward off and detect dysfunction.
His death is a tragedy, to be sure. And it’s highly likely that inviting Andy Cohen and a gaggle of cameramen over for Thanksgiving didn’t help Armstrong’s pre-existing personal and financial problems—of which there were many. But to suggest that the medium of reality TV or the network itself was to blame for the tragedy (as his family is suggesting) is pure, unadulterated, crap.
Call it base and barbaric (and it is), but combining unstable, irascible, authority-defying characters for entertainment’s sake is the entire point of reality television. It’s why we tune in, isn’t it? The casting agents for these shows aren’t seeking well-adjusted, normal people with healthy relationships and good communication skills. The crazies are what make it fun, which MTV discovered when they decided to fill the Real World house with college dropouts and gallons of booze and ratings soared.
Juggernaut network competition shows actually do screen potential contestants for psychological disturbances—exhaustively, in fact. They create intricate psychological profiles to predict how people will interact with each other and react in any given situation. Cable programs with smaller budgets are generally a little less concerned with this step in the vetting process, but it’s in any show’s best interest to weed out truly disturbed and vulnerable people while retaining those whose neuroses can be exploited without too much collateral damage. Whenever any cast is assembled, the ultimate question that producers have to answer is, Is this person fun-crazy or just crazy-crazy? Whether there are reams of research or not, it comes down to a guess, and producers don’t always make the right call.
So a few people end up being the wrong kind of crazy. A Real World roommate commits an assault. A contestant on VH1’s Megan Wants a Millionaire murders his ex-wife. An American Idol wannabe turns out to be a stalker. And yes, a few people decide to take their own lives, like Armstrong, a contestant from Paradise Hotel, and several other reality performers have done.
There’s no denying that the way producers of reality shows ply the cast members with alcohol, orchestrate situations for maximum conflict, and edit footage for maximum drama is problematic. Ethically wrong? Creatively bankrupt? Perhaps. But it’s their job to create ratings, not to babysit grown adults who agreed to be on the show in the first place and who should have known what they were getting into. Seriously—don’t any of these people ever actually watch reality shows before they agree to be on one? Did Armstrong never see the dirty details of other Housewives stars splashed across tabloids or read about their legal woes and the dissolution of their marriages? What was it about the lives of the Giudices or the Salahis that seemed like fun?
Instead of pointing fingers at “evil” producers or getting upset that real-life tragedy permeated our faux-reality TV, we should think again about what entertains us. The networks are doing what they do because people keep tuning in. If you’re uncomfortable with it, you have the power to stop watching, which might just stop the reality TV cycle that serves up people’s personal problems as entertainment. When enough people don’t watch, networks listen.
