There are several new tv shows in the offing that are being labelled "poverty porn" -- for example, people who are in desperate financial straits are given a briefcase with $100,000 in it. They are introduced to another family also in financial straits and then they are tasked with deciding how to share out the money. They can keep it or give some of it to the other family. There is another one in which people who are earning less than $30,000 are asked to compete in order to be chosen to earn a "living wage" ("Britain's Hardest Worker").
Often in the summer, I find a guilty pleasure on television and a few summers ago it was "Nanny: 911". It showed parents dealing with children and of course, the parents presented in the show were quite ineffectual and the children were defiant or neglected, not in a "child and family services" way, but in a way that I, as an audience member, could feel superior to. I realized what the show was doing -- portraying these parents who were so clueless that it made me feel like "at least I'm not that bad" when I made mistakes or didn't know what to do in a certain situation.
Of course, most of us know that "reality tv" is more tv than reality. The tv people want drama and something that will get us to watch, so they make sure they find it, and if they don't, they create it. If you think about what things would look like if someone was able to just walk into your life and choose moments and thread them together, you get the idea. I have kept a journal most of my life and I realize that I usually write in it when I'm mad or upset because that's what it's for! It's a place for me to vent. But if someone read it, they would get quite a negative picture of what I'm like. Not the picture that most people see, certainly. I am very fond of L.M. Montgomery (who wrote Anne of Green Gables {if you haven't read it, you should}) and I read her journals and she's pretty bleak in them and reviewers said that this was the "real" L.M. Montgomery, but I'm not so sure. Certainly, that was part of the real woman, but the face she showed to the world was part of her, too. And the spirit that breathed in her books was also part of the real woman.
The purveyors of "poverty porn" say that the purpose of the shows is to give us a glimpse into the struggles of real families and I suppose that it really depends on how it's done. If you wanted to do a documentary about families struggling with debt and low wages and high expenses, that would be okay, but turning these situations into what reads like a game show seems exploitive. If you wrote a script about a family who fell into a fortune, that would be okay, but using real people seems manipulative. What do you think?
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