ShareThisIt was a stunt that transfixed the world for a few hours, and while a Colorado couple is denying it was a hoax, a trial appears likely, if not a plea bargain, or fines, or jail -- and then, maybe, a reality show.
Richard Heene and his wife Mayumi on Wednesday are expected to turn themselves in to face charges that they pretended their young son had climbed aboard a homemade weather balloon that was spinning out of control, so the veterans of ABC's "Wife Swap" could generate buzz for a reality-show deal.
In this era of all-reality-all-the-time TV, anything is possible, but seriously, how low are we going to go to get our 15 minutes of fame?
"Andy Warhol would have loved this," said Tom Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, noting the artist's famous prediction in 1979 that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
While Heene may be one of the few reality-TV aspirants willing to break the law to get his big break, he is only one of thousands who have sought work in reality TV, defined by academics as programming that usually features "ordinary" people instead of actors in unscripted situations -- but which only occasionally seem to resemble reality and thrive on demeaning, exotic or sensationalistic situations to drive viewership.
While Sokolowski says he watches his share of "scuzz" television -- "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" is a current favorite -- he admits he can't quite comprehend why people subject themselves to the humiliations of reality television. "Would you really want the cameras on you every time the boss yelled at you? What about that woman who was going to be remarried to this guy who, in real life, was killed in a fight in a bar?"
It's simple, says Jonathan Taplin, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism. "People are desperate to be on television. They're struggling for a starring role in the drama of life, and this guy (Heene) wanted to get on TV. He had this whole science-detective pilot he wanted to shoot and was desperate to do anything to get noticed, so he employed his kid as a prop."
Indeed, the Heenes' saga, whether they broke the law or not, seems a kind of toxic stew of big dreams, bad parenting, thirst for fame and easy riches concocted to feed cable television's 24-hour demand for titillating programming. That in turn feeds the public's sense of schadenfreude -- pleasure in other people's misfortunes -- whether it's the dissolution of Jon and Kate Gosselin's marriage or failure to lose weight on "The Biggest Loser."
"Bruce Springsteen called it the theater of humiliation," Taplin said. "It's about the public watching and saying: 'My life isn't so bad. Look at these people I can look down on. Look at how desperate they are.' "
Certainly, in this era of social media, anyone can put themselves out there on cyberspace, on Twitter or on Facebook, to be humiliated or celebrated, said Hugh Curnutt, an assistant professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey who is currently writing a book on reality television.
"Technology has made it cheaper and easier and easier for you to take your image, yourself, capture it, record it and put it out somewhere that's public that everyone had access to. Before, I could post a photo of myself in a hallway; now I can set up a blog page."
But reality television is "a different animal than social media. It's produced, it is an industrial product." And, indeed, it has been with us since the dawn of television, proliferating in the 1980s and 1990s on public access and then cable television, but only entered the mainstream after 2000 with the advent of "Survivor" and "American Idol."
These days, demand has only grown, what with the proliferation of "niche networks," and nearly 400 channels on television, Taplin added.
"The Discovery Channel has 15, MTV has eight, and the easiest, cheapest way to fill their schedules is through reality TV with its unscripted, relatively low-cost production(s) ... Reality shows are driven by capitalism, to produce the cheapest product possible, half the cost of producing 'Grey's Anatomy,' while attracting ads that are almost as expensive."
In the end, the Heenes' 6-year-old son, Falcon, didn't follow the script, but the balloon-boy saga, and the toll it has taken on innocent children, is not an "aha" moment for reality TV, Curnutt believes, even if Falcon's father may have broken the law.
"Of course, without reality TV being out there, he might not have thought to do this in the first place."
(Mackenzie Carpenter can be reached at mcarpenter(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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