Reality Television

Some friends of mine recently put me on to the show "Starting Over." It's a show, as I understand it, where a group of women who are facing some serious life problems are put together in a house to live together and work out their problems with the help of counselors, life coaches, etc. These women are getting a chance to start life over, so to speak. I tried watching it and just couldn't do it, but it did get me thinking some.

With this genre of reality television there seems to be a growing number of genres within the genre. "Starting Over" I would put in the self-improvement, or makeover, category. There are any number of these makeover shows from the home shows like "Design on a Dime" or "Trading Spaces". There are the personal makeover shows like "Extreme Makeover", "You Can't Wear That", or the amazing "Swan". When we watch these shows we are happy for those who find that improvement in their life. I think many of us watch and find hope that maybe we could make some of these improvements in our life as well.

Some of the other reality shows work on a similar level, although perhaps a bit differently. The extreme examples would be the shows like "Jerry Springer" where we watch these reality shows and we are grateful that we are not as pathetic as the people we see on the screen. We watch other people to try and feel better about ourselves.

Consequently it would seem that with this explosion of reality of television we are now faced with a population that desperately wants to improve itself, wants to feel better about itself. So what can we do then to help, to serve, our neighbor and make them feel better about themselves? How do we go about improving the general ethos (or is it pathos? I get them confused) of our culture? How should the church be responding to this cry for help?

I suspect one way the church can be helpful is through being a haven of community. We live in an increasingly suburban context, or least mentality, it would seem to me. With that comes an increasingly isolated community. We don't know our neighbors anymore. So we seek community through characters on television shows. We find particular comfort, it would seem, in those characters being real people on reality television. Consequently, since our community is being found through an inanimate object we are even more isolated, thus perpetuating the problem. Can the church once again be a gathering point in a community? Is that perhaps the gift that we have to offer to the world? Then through belonging people might meet Jesus and in so doing find faith, find life. It something worth considering I would think.