David Kronke, Women behaving badly more than ever on reality TV: Bad girls will continue to have their exploits exploited on TV

Chicago Tribune  (December 28, 2009)

Jane Austen was hardly anticipating the reality TV phenomenon two centuries in her future when she wrote, in her 1815 novel "Emma," "Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief." But it's difficult to imagine so succinctly insightful a description of what results from the genre's lurid fascination with attractive and monumentally self-absorbed young women.

It has become a ubiquitous formula: Round up a gaggle of pert and perky gals who haven't spent much time considering the world around them and who don't play well with others, and follow their antics with camera crews. Invariably, they'll say things that betray a hilariously stunted worldview. Invariably, they'll offend anyone with a modicum of decorum. Often, they'll provoke confrontations.

And they won't seem to care whether the audience is laughing with them or at them.

Joel McHale, who routinely mocks the denizens of these programs on his E! series "The Soup," says he and his show's colleagues have "gotten a little too used to bad behavior."

Clearly, participants are encouraged to ratchet up their behavior to create jaw-dropping TV. Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, who emerged as one of reality's most elegantly withering antagonists on the first season of Donald Trump's "The Apprentice," admits, "Anyone who says, 'I created this (persona) on my own' is being ridiculous.

"The format of reality TV is that there are six or seven line producers, and what helps put the narrative together is the on-the-fly interviews, where they've been watching what you've been doing and ask you questions to help you tell your story."

Bravo's "Real Housewives" franchise revealed that vapid, materialistic and self-smitten women seeking easy stardom cannot be contained to any geographical location. Each of its four iterations has trucked in scandal, be it nude photos, sex tapes or dodgy background checks (a New Jersey housewife's past involves cocaine and an escort service, while the Atlanta housewives aren't as affluent as they claimed, as several are in debt). Story lines invariably climax with calamitous confrontations.

But the planned "Real Housewives of Washington, D.C." provoked controversy before hitting the air when Michaele and Tareq Salahi, vying to get on the series, crashed a White House state dinner.

"We've always had people famous simply for being famous," observes Karen Sternheimer, professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. "But now there are more avenues to access fame. The Salahis are when the floodgates broke. There's economic and social value when someone's interested in what we're doing."

Mark Andrejevic, a communications studies professor and the author of "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched," says: "Reality TV is a leveling genre: It takes the rich and famous down a peg and shows us that they're just like us. At the same time, it itself is a kind of lottery. Whoever it picks can be turned into a celebrity. It invokes the randomness of the economic machinery."

The pinnacle -- or, perhaps, nadir -- of the genre could very well be Oxygen's "Bad Girls Club," which recently returned to its highest ratings to date teasing a brutal catfight that would come later in the season. The show otherwise plays out as a string of confrontations between rowdy, raunchy women who lay waste to a mansion during the course of the shoot.

Early episodes included a rage-aholic ejected from a bar for throwing a drink at a bartender after insisting, "I run LA" and another woman introducing herself by declaring, "I lost my virginity in my church."

These shows and their eager participants aren't going away. "With this recession, more people are under stress, and there are far less opportunities for conventional success," says Sternheimer.

Perhaps Austen had the right idea when she wrote, in "Pride and Prejudice," "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"

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