Careful what you wish for

As it turns out people don’t want “the real world” in their neighborhoods (gasp!). Now wait a minute, isn’t the show popular because the people who watch it either want this reality or already imagine themselves to be living it? That’s why lines wrap around buildings when auditions come to town. We call it “real” because we can relate, because we can easily imagine ourselves, or at least our less inhibited (totally nuts?) friends from college and high school on these shows. But when it moves into our own backyard we heckle and throw beer bottles at the cast? For as “real” as “the real world” is, did we forget that it’s still TV and still escapism, the kind of reality that we fantasize about in short sittings because in the long term it tends to disrupt our lives? I think it’s poetic justice that shows on TV claiming to be “real” have to be shot somewhere outside of Hollywood, in some “real” town other than the tinsel one. It makes the irony clear as day that people love the show until they have to face up, god forbid, to its reality.