I had this discussion with a friend the other day.  I don't watch "reality" TV shows of the Bachelor variety for a number of reasons.  First of all, the situations are completely unreal --- take one guy, surround him with 25 beautiful women, and he gets to whittle it down to the one he is finally satisfied with. And they all compete to see which of them is "lucky" enough to be with the guy.  Even for the guys on this site that is a fantasy.  Or drop couples on a gorgeous Caribbean resort island, subject them to models that most of us would drool over, and see if someone cheats.  Does the word Duh mean anything to these people?  At some point the sheer unreality of the situations destroys the idea that I am watching something remotely realistic.

Second of all, what I am watching is a cut and pasted, severely edited version of what happened.  I am only seeing what the producers think will make good TV, and I am not getting a good representation of what really happened or what these people are really like.  Survivor is the worst offender in this category (they retape competitions to make them more action intense, or to cover for mistakes, or just to get better angles) but all the shows do it.  

Third, and most importantly, the main attraction is the conflict and pain brought to those individuals who participate.  This was really brought home to me on the first season of Temptation Island and then later with the Bachelor: those are real people who are really getting their hearts torn out and I am watching it for amusement.  I understand that they agreed to do the show and therefore have lost their right to privacy over it, but that doesn't change the fact that I am being entertained by someone else's humiliation.  At that point it becomes less about them and more about me: what does it say about me, and about our culture in general, that we find this entertaining?  What does it say about how we value people?  

I do not mean for this to come off sounding moralistic or preachy, but I really wonder about a culture that looks to that for its entertainment.  We have become a voyeur nation, watching other people's reality because our own is so boring.  What this says to me is that we have an entire nation of people who live lives that are dull, empty, and meaningless.  It was after coming to this conclusion a couple of years ago that I renewed my commitment to living fully --- reading, seeing, doing, and saying all the things that I wanted to if there were no tomorrow.