I used to watch Animal Planet for the dog shows—I remember seeing my first agility competitions there (the sport where dogs and their handlers negotiate an obstacle course of jumps, tunnels, and things to weave through and climb) as well as earth dog trials (dogs going into an underground maze in search of a some kind of rodent-like lure), dock-diving and frisbee competitions, and of course any number of canine beauty pageants. There’s not much agility on the channel these days (I now practice the sport on the weekends), although there are still several companion-animal programs dotting the daytime schedule, especially: Pet Star, All New Planet’s Funniest Animals, Good Dog U, Dogs 101 and Cats 101, and British dog trainer Victoria Stilwell’s “international smash-hit TV show” It’s Me or the Dog, in which she helps dog-owners deal with basic problems that are too frequently the result of the owners’ stunning ignorance about what dogs actually are and do (the owners certainly don’t ever seem to have seen It’s Me or the Dog, or even Cesar Millan’s The Dog Whisperer on National Geographic, because otherwise they’d already know what to do, with some mostly bizarre or extreme exceptions: make sure the dog gets plenty of exercise, set consistent boundaries, and reward it for doing what you want it to do and don’t give it the opportunity to do what you don’t want it to do).

I did considerable research into dogs and dog behavior and training before I acquired either of my two mixed-breed angels, so I don’t have much use for It’s Me or the Dog or The Dog Whisperer unless I’m feeling snarky and want to yell at the TV. But I recently attempted to watch Animal Planet’s Jockeys, a reality show about a group of jockeys, male and female, who are trying with varying degrees of success to rise to the top in the competitive and dangerous world of big-stakes horse-racing. Jockeys, now in its second season, is entertaining, but I don’t think I can continue to watch it, at least not while it’s on Animal Planet. Because it’s Animal Planet itself that has become the problem for me.

Simply put, I can’t figure out who the channel thinks its audience is. Certain commercials and some of its website content suggests that it is companion-animal lovers, people who want their pets to be the next “Hollywood action star” or who are interested in “tail-wagging trivia” about the “Top 40 Popular Dogs,” and maybe others who want to learn a bit about undomesticated animals through shows such as Meerkat Manor, one of the network’s biggest hits. But by far the bulk of Animal Planet’s programming now centers on animals as monsters, on the one hand, and humans as monstrously abusive of animals, on the other, and in inordinately exploitative visual terms. While Meerkat Manor frequently, and sometimes graphically, does remind its viewers that nature is red in tooth and claw, it’s nothing compared to the network’s current roster: Killing for a Living, Your Worst Animal Nightmares, Headline Attacks, Rogue Nature, The Big Sting, The Most Shocking Animal Attacks, Untamed and Uncut, More Headline Attacks. As the New York Times puts it in its review of The Monsters Inside Me, a new show about internal human and animal parasites with an extreme “ick factor,” Animal Planet (along with other of its Discovery family of channels) now promotes a “depiction of the natural world in terms of violence, threat, warfare and paranoia. . . [I]t’s as if Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay had developed a sideline in animal documentaries.”1

Which means that while I am sitting on the couch moderately engrossed in the romantic travails of a jockey couple, I’m confronted suddenly with a promo for The Monsters Inside Me, and it’s disgusting, and hard to throw off because the scenes of red and slimy organs with unwanted parasites feasting on them aren’t special effects, they’re “real,” and threatening (the commercial is repeated several times throughout the hour). It’s even harder to get past the spot for Animal Cops: Phoenix, in which there’s a shot of a puppy with its ears cut off among other vignettes of human cruelty (this commercial is repeated too). Indeed, it’s the Animal Cops and Animal Precinct shows, which, centered in different cities, follow licensed humane-society investigators of various kinds in their daily rounds, that are the most difficult to parse. Certainly many animal lovers are interested in and support exposing and punishing cases of animal cruelty and neglect; and the “cops” on the shows are often heroic in their actions on behalf of creatures whose powerlessness and existential innocence are always at the heart of their appeal to us, and part of the burden we take on when we care for them (and who’s not a sucker for a kitten stuck in a drain). But, like the network itself, the shows also teeter between amelioration and exploitation, as does the channel’s website (“Learn more about some of your favorite Animal Cops from Philadelphia, Houston and more!”; “Browse our archive full of favorite video moments!”). At what point do you need animal cruelty and abuse if you’ve got another season and time slot to program? So many cities, so many possibilities, so much money at stake.

In the end, it’s the combination of piety and gratuitous shock tactics—the “rhetorics of loathing or of condescension,” in Steve Baker’s words—that makes Animal Planet so disturbing to me.2 Most of its primetime shows represent animals as things to fear, that attack you from within and without, even companion animals, even the ones we take into our homes or trust with our children. So an abused puppy is at once a heartrending sight but also just another “animal nightmare” with a strong “ick factor.” Animal Planet’s slogan is “Same planet. Different world,” and there’s an ambiguous self-reflexivity here; the network itself represents two different worlds, and one makes the other extremely unpleasant to inhabit—I’m with Darwin, that to contemplate the plight of the lower animals throughout history is almost more than I can bear, and I can’t imagine that he would enjoy Animal Cops much either. If the show aims to inspire spectators to become animal activists themselves, the way the network promotes it I’m not sure whether the goal is supposed to be to help animals or to become a TV star, a “Top 10 Animal Cop” (I’m not questioning the motives of the investigators themselves).

We all know that cable networks have learned the value of “niche strategy,” of narrowcasting, of positioning themselves to take advantage of what Chris Anderson has termed the “long tail” in marketing (there’s even an all-horse-racing channel now, HRTV).3 If the sometimes horrified fascination that attends to watching a group of willing reality-show contestants battle for the title of “Top Groomer” is similar to that produced by the parasites of The Monsters Inside Me (Groomer Has It was another dog-based Animal Planet reality show that I attempted to watch this summer), the topics are not, in the end, the same, and why they are not is, as always, about power. Again, I have no doubt that many who work at and watch the network do understand animals as “ordinary knotted beings,” in Donna Haraway’s words, that are “also always meaning-making figures that gather up those who respond to them into unpredictable kinds of ‘we.’”4 But the aggressive marketing of the implication that attacks of animals, domesticated or wild, upon humans are equivalent to the attacks of humans—who should, and can, know better—upon animals makes me want to cut off Animal Planet’s own “long tail.” Maybe there’s a new show in that somewhere.

Image Credits:
1.) Victoria Stillwell of It’s Me or the Dog
2.) Brain Parasite on The Monsters Inside Me
3.) Animal Cops on Animal Planet

Please feel free to comment.

1. Mike Hale, “The Enemy Within: Wrigglies From Hell,” New York Times (June 30, 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/arts/television/01monsters.html.
2. Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (University of Illinois Press, 1993, 2001), 4.
3. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hyperion: 2006, rev. 2008).
4. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 5. See also her Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). Haraway does agility too.

I first started watching HGTV (“House and Garden Television,” although it ought to be “Home and Garden,” for there are no houses on HGTV, only homes) about a year ago. While I’d always had “shelter lit” around and enjoyed decorating, fixing up, and generally puttering in my 1959 house (would that I could call it “mid-century modern,” but it’s just plain ranch), I’d never been attracted to watching strangers do the same in their own abodes before. Maybe it was simply that there wasn’t anything left that I could do to my house that wouldn’t require lots of money and the extended presence of contractors; lacking my usual outlets of activity and domestic satisfaction (cleaning and cooking don’t count), I found myself forced into passive voyeurism. (It was beyond my control—the cry of addicts everywhere.) HGTV quickly became a comfort channel of choice, and it hardly mattered to me whether I was watching House Hunters (the longest-running show on the network) or Property Virgins or Spice Up My Kitchen or Divine Design or Rate My Space; it was precisely the old-style “flow” that was soothing—the constant stream of other people’s houses, stuff, and choices, sometimes in cities I’d once lived in or visited, the touristic pleasure of being simultaneously elsewhere and at home. But while I still watch HGTV, I no longer find it so comforting; instead, and what I focus on here, it has become irritating and a bit anxiety-provoking.

Of course, a lot of formerly comforting things involving the buying, selling, and “improving” of houses have become sources of anxiety because of the real-estate bust. In May 2009 the New York Times went so far as to name HGTV the cable channel “more closely associated than any other with the country’s housing crisis and the perils of easy credit and living beyond one’s means,” also citing a January op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal that labeled HGTV “a villain of the meltdown” because “you couldn’t watch these shows without concluding that you must be an idiot and a loser if you lived in a house you could actually afford.” 1 It’s true that some of HGTV’s house-buying shows feature people who seem to have nothing else to do but live large and well (especially House Hunters International, in which people who own giant beachfront houses with pools in Florida or California seek giant vacation beachfront houses with pools in Jamaica or Costa Rica). And one can’t help but wonder about the current status of all those hapless house hunters in what are now dead markets (Phoenix, Las Vegas, much of Florida)—some 2007 episodes of House Hunters and Property Virgins still run, although I haven’t seen many older than that—who purchased their “dream homes” with no down payments and 100% financing, ending up with staggeringly huge mortgage payments and houses that clearly would not sell now (or not for the prices they paid).

But villain or not, the fact is that HGTV’s audience continues to grow; the network currently ranks among cable’s twenty most popular in primetime.2 And I do believe that, for many still as for me initially, the very repetitiveness and generic structure of the programming, in addition to its insistence on the importance of “home,” helps keep it comforting (in Terry Castle’s words, “house porn” may be “a postmodern equivalent of traditional consolation literature”).3 The return from each commercial break begins with a recap of all that has gone before, so there’s virtually no suspense about anything (it’s ludicrous to show us the “gift”—usually a decorated and furnished room or outdoor space—that a young couple will receive from the network at the end of every My First Place while asking us to bite our knuckles about whether or not they’ll get to enjoy it). And I know now, having done research for this piece, that the house hunters of House Hunters aren’t, really; they already have contracts on their chosen houses, and are paid to pretend to look at two others in order to produce the illusion of the “hunt.” And that most if not all of the design or makeover shows—Spice Up My Kitchen, Dear Genevieve, Rate My Space, Income Property (whose host is both competent and gorgeous)—require substantial cash input from participants.

But while research and visits to viewer forums and message boards on televisionwithoutpity.com contributed to making HGTV a less comfortable place to hang out, what really got to me was the waste and standardization of taste and consumption that its shows, with some exceptions, participate in valorizing and generating. Lip-service to “individuality” and “originality” and “going green” notwithstanding, Spice Up My Kitchen, in other words, might as well be called You Need New Granite Countertops, Maple Cabinets, and Stainless Steel Appliances.

I don’t see Spice Up My Kitchen much in the lineup anymore, for which I am grateful; I no longer have to watch a maybe run-down and weirdly painted but otherwise repairable 1920s bungalow kitchen undergo total and gleeful “demo” so that another “dream kitchen” of granite, maple or cherry, and stainless steel can be installed. I only remember one show (it was probably Get It Sold, also now gone from the primetime lineup as far as I can tell) that praised a 1950s pink tile bathroom, pristine but for some bad wallpaper, as part of a home’s “vintage charm.” Even when house hunters profess to want “character,” they usually end up falling for the new McMansion with giant closets, an “open floor plan,” and double bathroom sinks—and, of course, stainless steel, granite, maple, etc. Anything that does not fulfill these design mandates automatically “needs upgrading,” although one hopes that, once the cameras are off, the homeowners come to their senses and realize that it’s only a matter of time before granite and maple prompt the groans and scorn they are heaping upon laminate and oak. Among the most interesting new HGTV shows in this regard—part of the network’s “extensive effort to set the right tone in a somber economy,” as the New York Times puts it—is Real Estate Intervention, in which individuals who have purchased high-end appliances and upscale “design features” find not only that their properties aren’t as unique as they think they are but that they cannot sell them except a loss.4

I do realize that I am all over the place here, wanting some things to be conserved—a craftsman-style 1920s kitchen, or a black-and-white tile bathroom from the 1940s—on the basis of their historical significance or aesthetic value when, again, at some point these older features were themselves the stainless and granite of their day. I can’t watch a commercial television network supported in large measure by big-box home-improvement stores and expect its shows to encourage any but the most minimal recycling or conservation. I do find that lately I’m watching more of the DIY Network (a sister to HGTV). At least for now, it seems to have less of the tear-it-out-because-it’s-there mentality, although there’s a fair amount of disco-backed demo (“testoster-home improvement,” as one host called it) in shows like Bathtastic and Desperate Landscapes. I’m especially soothed by the low-key and low-tech re-runs of Ask This Old House, in which kindly experts show me step-by-step how to fix the low spot on my stoop or install a door, as well as Sweat Equity, which is hosted by a woman contractor who seems less interested in fads than in functionality. I only hope that I can continue to hold out; I’ve seen so much stainless steel for so long that it’s starting to look classic.5

Image Credits:
1.) Mike Aubrey and a homeowner on HGTV’s Real Estate Intervention.
2.) Scott McGillivray, licensed contractor and host of Income Property.
3.) An “after” kitchen from Spice Up My Kitchen
4.) Amy Matthews, licensed contractor and host of Sweat Equity and other shows on the DIY Network

1. Brian Stelter, “Reality Check for Real Estate Shows,” New York Times (May 21, 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/arts/television/24stel.html?_r=2&scp=6&sq=hgtv&st=cse (accessed on July 30, 2009).
2. ibid
3. Terry Castle, “Home Alone,” The Atlantic (March 2006), http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/house-porn (accessed on June 9, 2009).
4. Brian Stelter, “Housing Slump Helps the Draw of Fixer-Upper TV,” New York Times (June 12, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/business/media/12flip.html?fta=y (accessed on July 30, 2009).
5. For earlier takes on HGTV in this venue, see Ron Becker, “Horribly Guilty Television: HGTV and the Promotion of America’s Ownership Society” (April 24, 2008), and Julia Lesage, “Narrative Pleasures in House Hunters” (November 13, 2008).

This column is a rumination on some of the people we watch on reality television. It was prompted by several months of addiction to BBC-America’s Cash in the Attic, as well as by HGTV’s evening lineup in which more or less horrifying things are done to folks’ homes in the name of “updating” or “improving” (more on house porn next time).1 Of interest to me are shifts in the meaning of what is often referred to as TV’s “ontology of liveness,” in particular how liveness and reality and authenticity seem to have become virtually synonymous concepts on commercial entertainment television.

Anecdote 1: In the 2007 HBO series Tell Me You Love Me, which concerns a group of loosely connected couples with relationship issues, a wife poses the following question to her spouse, who is fiddling with his TiVo to avoid talking to her: “‘Are you ever going to watch live TV again?” He answers, “Not if I can help it.”

Anecdote 2: In November 2007, Entertainment Weekly featured the following letter in response to an article about changing television demographics and how they are measured: “The Nielsen ratings are antiquated and inaccurate. I don’t know anyone who watches live TV anymore: We’re using our DVRs or our computers. If the networks are listening to Nielsen, they should be airing The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Anecdote 3: This spring, I overheard a guy discussing how he had watched something “live” on his “smartphone.” He was referring to a popular YouTube video, not an event to which he had immediate access as it was occurring in the world.

What these anecdotes suggest to me is that the meaning of “live” has been substantially disconnected from its association with the immediate (re)presentation or broadcast of an event to the site and time of that event’s consumption, and I am fascinated by how this all interacts with what I have come to think of as reality-TV “acting.” In Cash in the Attic, as with endless other shows of this ilk, an emcee (the “host”) appears first, his job (in older episodes it’s a woman) being to explain where we are and why. However casual his manner, the host is an obvious show-business professional, and he addresses his performance directly to the camera. This also invokes liveness, though, in that as a style of performance it mimics that of the roving on-location newsperson, about to report on something that has not yet occurred—here, the visit to a household by one of two antiques experts who will rummage through the family’s stuff looking for things to sell at auction (an auction we will also attend and that will generate the suspense of whether the family will or will not make a certain sum of money). Once the expert arrives, everyone—host included—now studiously avoids looking at the camera, acting, in all senses of the term, as though the camera is not there, as though what is going on is simply being recorded as it happens. Moreover, the non-actors, in contrast to the host or even the expert, perform with what Robert Self refers to as “the ring of the amateur.”2 They are acting as themselves, but they aren’t very good at it—they’re usually a bit stiff, and if they try to be “lively” and “natural” it’s even worse. But it is important that there be “bad acting” in reality television by people who are not actors by trade, because that makes the people therefore real, believable; the “ring of the amateur” is itself the mark of the authentic.

It is not that “true” liveness has ever been common on commercial television; but as Jane Feuer pointed out long ago, whether something actually is live is not as crucial as the “impression of liveness” manufactured by television and its techniques and production values.3 Feuer claims that “as television in fact becomes less and less a ‘live’ transmission, the medium in its own practices seems to insist more and more upon an ideology of the live, the immediate, the direct, the spontaneous, the real.”4 Justin Lewis goes so far as to suggest that reality television, whether makeover show or the “more fanciful world of gamedoc captivity,” depends upon “the idea that we are watching real people in all their unscripted vulnerability.” 5 It is not too far from this to suggest that real people are the marker of the live and, or as, the unscripted.

Given that actual liveness is so rare, except in the case of news and the “breaking story” (including the grand finales of some competition-based reality shows), I think I’m suggesting that the value of liveness as the ontological characteristic of the televisual has been supplanted by, and is often confused with, what is proffered as “reality.” Reality is “what was once live” (rather than rehearsed and acted) and has come to be located more and more in modes of human performance (and spectatorship) even as other formal mechanisms of reality programming (camerawork and cinematography, editing, sound) take on all of the characteristics of “classical” film- and television-based storytelling. Authenticity and liveness have also become essentially interchangeable attributes, such that the “ring of the amateur” means authenticity, and authenticity in turn means liveness—the unscripted, the unrehearsed, the accidental (even when clearly things are rehearsed, are scripted, are not accidental). The complex interaction of notions of liveness, authenticity, and reality can of course be explored using any range of television texts, but I believe that “performing real” on television and in other digital technologies retains an association with “performing live,” an intersection that film, despite its long history of actualities, documentaries, and other modes of reality-based cinema (or, conversely, the consumption of film as television, through the burgeoning home-theater market, or as downloadable Internet content), does not yet share.6

Perhaps this explains why so many (mostly younger?) people call scheduled television programming “live,” because it is in opposition to that which they choose to watch on their own time in a particular place (and a “smartphone” makes things live because they can be accessed anywhere). And while this liveness might be fake on certain obvious levels, it exists, or it matters, because we want to believe that somewhere there is liveness in which we might choose to partake but which we don’t have to watch as it happens. In other words, the ultimate paradox, for me, is that reality television may work in this moment partly because real live television is much, much too scary, too unpredictable, too disturbing.

It’s not hard to notice that the attempts to make reality programming seem live and immediate are also ultimately protective—we are never going to see anything that’s out-of-control live (much less true “dead time”), the way live “used to be.” Reality TV and its acting styles now substitute for and are read as the live, perhaps in some melancholy or earnest or deluded attempt to keep the real live world where it safely belongs—someplace where we can control it, or where we can sooth ourselves that it all comes down to voting with our cell phones for whom we think deserves to win Dancing with the Stars.7 It’s much too horrible when what looks like a movie turns out to be real, and live, and immediate; much better, much easier, that what looks real, and live, and immediate, turns out to be just entertainment.

Image Credits:
1.) The Hosts of BBC’s Cash in the Attic
2.) Survivor host Jeff Probst Evoking Liveness
3.) Live Television at its Scariest, Most Unpredictable…

Please feel free to comment.

1. There’s an HGTV version of Cash in the Attic too, to which all these comments pertain, but I find its “attics” much too boring.
2. Robert T. Self, “Resisting Reality: Acting by Design in Robert Altman’s Nashville,” in Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, and Frank P. Tomasulo, eds., More Than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 142.
3. Quoted in Rhona J. Berenstein, “Acting Live: TV Performance, Intimacy, and Immediacy (1945-1955),” in James Friedman, ed., Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 27.
4. ibid
5. Justin Lewis, “The Meaning of Real Life,” in Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, eds., Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 288.
6. As Arild Fetveit puts it in “Reality TV in the Digital Era: A Paradox in Visual Culture?,” the “simultaneity of the digital ‘revolution in photography’ and the proliferation of visual evidence seems paradoxical. It seems as if we are experiencing a strengthening and a weakening of the credibility of photographic discourses at the same time” (in Friedman, 119).
7. To me, this seems borne out by the increasing significance of the Internet and its user-driven content—see recent coverage of events in Iran, among many possible examples—as the locus of “the live” as well.