(dave e)

where the deer and the antelope play

an odd thing happened this afternoon.

i've got no guilt about my attachment to second-tier television. i am easily sated by watching hours of documentary networks (i am, in all likelihood, the discovery network's target market). i love the discovery wings channel, the biography channel, the travel channel, and pretty much anything else that sets out to dumb down and explain things to folks like me.

extended aside: there is a paradox afoot, here. i loathe air travel. i am the guy next to whom you would rather not sit during take off, as i am likely to shift around alot, holding onto the seat in front of me in order to work off some anxiety. the greatest accomplishment of my life, possibly, was the collection of flights i took between d.c., frankfurt, johannesburg, and the south african lowveld last year. and yet, i assure you that if you and i, friend, were walking along, and a plane flew overhead, i could tell you whether it was a 737 or an A330. there is comfort in facts, somehow. i highly recommend salon's ask the pilot (subscription required) column for white-knuckled flyers. end of extended aside.

so, as an afficianado of nonfiction television, i happily forfeited a few hours this afternoon to rebroadcast episodes of the pbs series/experiment frontier house. i call this odd because i generally get little or nothing from "reality" television, a mass of re-tooled drivel to which i am perfectly content to snobbishly condescend. (wow... how's that for snobbishly condescending syntax?! where's my masterpiece theatre?). natalie has persuaded me to watch a few episodes of the amazing race, and i'll confess to indulging in some survivor as each season gets interesting. each has its merits, yet those winning moments are utterly erased when travelers shout "speak english!" at korean cab drivers or producers offer up embarrasingly uninformed "tribal" music from the wrong hemisphere. catty crooners looking to be american idylls confound me, too.

i think it was the pbs framing that sold me. instead of the utterly predictable crap that accompanies joe millionaire, i get a soothing narrator whose graceful exposition of livestock slaughter, infectious disease, and waste removal make frontier house "history." i'm learning, consuming facts, growing my inner liberal humanist. probably no different from ogling at the array of boob jobs on (apparently pointless! there's no known prize) temptation island (seriously, no need to follow that link), but frontier house scurried off with my afternoon like a little prairie mouse, darting across the cabin floor to a favorite hiding place in the gingham bedding.

i actually got a bit choked up when the kid realized his family pig was going to play the leading role at the upcoming community dinner.

and then, they blew it... the last thirty minutes of the last episode caught up with all three families (one finds itself blissfully wealthy but... eh... unfulfilled in its malibu estate; one finds itself vagabond-ish, one finds itself all kinds of separated). couldn't take it. the reality reared its head, and the moral-of-the-story got rammed down my throat. no, thanks. it may have been a hard scrabble life out yonder on the prairie -- i bought it, anyway -- but when it transformed into the "real"... yawn.

i'm a bit perplexed. do i want my reality-tv fantasy at a distance? do i need it pushed back to the 19th century, its logic rigorously upheld? when the shining faces of the 1830s became the lipsticked and shaved faces of the 21st, the show lost its appeal for me. that's weird, i think, because its historical context, ostensibly its accuracy, its detailed attention to nonfiction, had me consumed. maybe its the over-the-top packaging that highlights the artifice of mainstream reality tv. hyperkinetic cuts, loud music, car crashes, smashed (fragile) egos, all that. but there were pbs characters i grew to loathe in just a few hours, too.

then again, its just t.v.

Posted by dave at August 17, 2003 7:30 PM | TrackBack