Imagine you’re watching the Jersey Shore: you know, the part where you think you’re about to get a front-row ticket to the smush-show thanks to those conveniently placed night cameras – and then it cuts to commercial. Take a look at yourself. Were your eyes closed? WERE THEY?! Or were you on the edge of your seat? Keep a mental note.
Playboy TV’s newest reality series, Brooklyn Kinda Love, takes sex even further off-script, and this time it stays on-camera. The show, which aims to draw not only a female crowd to the Playboy channel (see ya later, boys club) but a couples crowd, blurs the line that separates the risque from the flat-out pornographic. Premiering tomorrow, January 15th, Brooklyn Kinda Love masquerades behind the ‘docu-reality’ label: the angle is that you get to watch four real-world couples go through all the crap “normal” couples go through, but the ‘reality’ is that you only get to watch the pieces of their lives wherein they psycho-analyze themselves, talk about getting it on, and then get it on. Wait! They also fight about getting it on. (Oh, if only Alfred Kinsey were alive today…)
Before you judge this show for exposing too much, think back to your reaction of that Jersey Shore scene. Love it or hate it, if most people had been closing their eyes for the smushing, the show wouldn’t be in its third season. Shows are beginning to walk the fine line between entertainment and desensitization, and there seems to be a direct correlation between the rise of both. Just look at MTV’s other summer series, The Hard Times of RJ Berger. It’s about a high school kid who becomes notorious for housing a tree between his legs – and it’s targeted at teens. There might have been some sour buzz when it first hit airwaves, but for the most part nobody raised a finger in protest and it wound up with a contract for a second season. A far cry from Daria, MTV.
After reviewing the first two of episodes of Brookyln Kinda Love, I’ll argue that it embraces both desensitization and entertainment -at least for today’s standards. In ten years, this will be considered tame. But by then porn will be playing between segments in the news and nothing will excite us more than a sneak peek at some seriously kinky shit that probably doesn’t even exist yet.
Now, I’m not here to discuss whether the move toward less censorship is good or bad. Things evolve, it happens. And hey, maybe we have been too prude until now, who am I to judge? That’s life. But you know what’s not life? Reality TV. And this is where I get really judgmental:
All of this focus on “getting it on” begs the question: how far is too far when it comes to reality TV? And why, oh WHY, do they keep calling it “docu-reality?!” Can they please start calling it “fractured reality” or “people showing off for the camera with regrettable acts of public indecency in what appears to be reality?” I mean, I’m sure people would keep watching, but at least our moral compasses would point sightly straighter. Because the thing about reality is that when you call it “reality” people think they should imitate it, believing that it is, in fact, reality! This is the problem. It’s the same problem couples’ therapists worldwide have with porn: when people think that what they’re seeing on TV is supposed to be what they are doing in real life, shit gets messy and therapists are summoned.
Remember how pissed people were when The Bachelor‘s Brad Womack turned down both remaining contestants for the final rose in 2007? He had to go to therapy. Therapy! All because he said no to marrying a couple of chicks on a TELEVISION SHOW. It’s a television show, people, and you’re getting involved as if a stranger’s choice on-camera affects your world off-camera. And THAT is the problem with pushing the limits (and the censorship) of ‘reality’ TV. People are losing their ability to differentiate between life and entertainment.
So if you’re down to watch four couples act out the parts of their relationships that the Playboy producers want you to see, sans all of the boring day-to-day stuff that reality is actually comprised of, check out Brooklyn Kinda Love. It’s funny, it’s shocking, and it might even make you think… but above all, it’s entertainment.
