Everything Bad Is Good for You (18 page)

Reality programming unfolds in the most artificial of environments: tropical islands swarming with invisible camera crews; castles populated by beautiful single women and one (fake) millionaire bachelor. But they nonetheless possess an emotional authenticity that is responsible for much of their appeal. At the peak moments—when Joe Millionaire reveals his true construction worker identity; when a contestant gets kicked off the island late in a
Survivor
series—the camera zooms in on the crestfallen face of the unlucky contestant, and what you see for a few fleeting seconds is something you almost never see in prime-time entertainment: a display of genuine emotion written on someone's face. The thrill of it is the thrill of something real and unplanned bursting out in the most staged and sterile of places, like a patch of wildflowers blooming in a parking lot. I find these moments cringe-inducing, because the emotions are so raw, but also bizarrely hypnotic: these are people who have spent the last six months dreaming of a life-changing event, only to find at the last minute that they've fallen short. The thrill of reality TV is seeing their face at the moment they get the news; the thrill of thinking, “This is actually happening.” Next to that kind of emotional intensity, it's no wonder the sitcom—with its one-liners and canned laughter—has begun to wither.

I admit that there's something perverse in these moments, something like the frisson that pornography used to induce before it became a billion-dollar industry: what electrifies is the sense that
this is actually happening.
In a world of forgeries, this person on the screen isn't faking it, at least for that split second as the emotion washes over his face. You cover your eyes because the authenticity of the feeling is almost too hot for the medium.

“Split second” is the appropriate timescale here; the intelligence that the reality shows draw upon is the intelligence of microseconds: the revealing glance, the brief look of disbelief, a traitorous frown quickly wiped from a face. Humans express the full complexity of their emotions through the unspoken language of facial expressions, and we know from neuroscience that parsing that language—in all of its subtlety—is one of the great accomplishments of the human brain. One measure of this intelligence is called AQ, short for “autism quotient.” People with low AQ scores are particularly talented at reading emotional cues, anticipating the inner thoughts and feelings of other people, a skill that is sometimes called mind reading. (Autistic people suffer from a diminished capacity for reading the language of facial expressions, which is why a high AQ score implies worse mind reading skills.) AQ can be seen as a subset of Daniel Goleman's concept of “emotional intelligence”; being smart is sometimes about doing complicated math in our heads, or making difficult logical decisions, but an equally important measure of practical intelligence is our ability to assess—and respond appropriately—to other people's emotional signals.

When you look at reality TV through the lens of AQ, the cognitive demands of the genre become much easier to appreciate. We had game shows to evaluate and reward our knowledge of trivia, and professional sports to reward our physical intelligence. Reality shows, in turn, challenge our emotional intelligence and our AQ. They are, in a sense, elaborately staged group psychology experiments, where at the end of the session the subjects get a million dollars and a week on the cover of
People
instead of a fifty-dollar stipend. The shows seem so fresh to today's audience because they tap this crucial faculty of the mind in ways that ordinary dramas or comedies rarely do—borrowing the participatory format of the game show while simultaneously challenging our emotional IQ.
The Apprentice
may not be the smartest show in the history of television, but it nonetheless forces you to think while you watch it, to work through the social logic of the universe it creates on the screen. And compared with
The Price Is Right
or
Webster,
it's an intellectual masterpiece.

Television turns out to be a brilliant medium for assessing other people's emotional intelligence or AQ—a property that is too often ignored when critics evaluate the medium's carrying capacity for thoughtful content. Part of this neglect stems from the age-old opposition between intelligence and emotion: intelligence is following a chess match or imparting a sophisticated rhetorical argument on a matter of public policy; emotions are the province of soap operas. But countless studies have demonstrated the pivotal role that emotional intelligence plays in seemingly high-minded arenas: business, law, politics. Any profession that involves regular interaction with other people will place a high premium on mind reading and emotional IQ. Of all the media available to us today, television is uniquely suited for conveying the fine gradients of these social skills. A book will give you a better vista of an individual's life story, and a newspaper op-ed is a better format for a rigorous argument, but if you're trying to evaluate a given person's emotional IQ and you don't have the option of sitting down with them in person, the tight focus of television is your best bet. Reality programming has simply recognized that intrinsic strength and built a whole genre around it.

Politics, too, has gravitated toward the television medium's emotional fluency. This is often derided as a coarsening or sentimentalizing of the political discourse, turning the rational debate over different political agendas into a Jerry Springer confessional. The days of the Lincoln–Douglas debates have given way to “Boxers or briefs?” The late Neil Postman described this sorry trend as the show-businessification of politics in his influential 1985 book,
Amusing Ourselves to Death.
In Postman's view, television is a medium of cosmetics, of surfaces, an endless replay of the Nixon–Kennedy debates, where the guy with the best makeup always wins. “Although the Constitution makes no mention of it, it would appear that fat people are now effectively excluded from running for high political office,” he writes. “Probably bald people as well. Almost certainly those whose looks are not significantly enhanced by the cosmetician's art. Indeed, we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.”

No doubt some of what Postman says is true, though Bill Clinton did manage to eke out a successful political career while battling a minor weight problem. Television lets you see the physical characteristics of the people you're voting for with an accuracy unrivaled by any medium to date. To be sure, this means that physically repulsive individuals have suffered on election day. (Of course, it also means a commander in chief will no longer be able to conceal from the American people the simple fact that he can't
walk.
)

But the visibility of the medium extends beyond hairstyles and skin tone. When we see our politicians in the global living room of televised intimacy, we're able to detect more profound qualities in them: not just their grooming, but their emotional antennae—their ability to connect, outfox, condemn, or console. We see them as emotional mind readers, and there are few qualities in an individual more predictive of their ability to govern a country, because mind reading is so central to the art of persuasion. Presidents make formal appearances and sit for portraits and host galas, but their day-to-day job is motivating and persuading other people to follow their lead. To motivate and persuade you have to have an innate radar for other people's mental states. For an ordinary voter, it's almost impossible to get a sense for a given candidate's emotional radar without seeing them in person, in an unscripted setting. You can't get a sense of a candidate's mind reading skills by watching them give a memorized stump speech, or seeing their thirty-second ads, or God knows reading their campaign blog posts. But what
does
give you that kind of information is the one-on-one television interview format
—Meet the Press
and
Charlie Rose,
of course, but probably more effectively,
Oprah,
because the format is more social and free-flowing.

So what we're getting out of the much-maligned Oprahization of politics is not boxers-or-briefs personal trivia—it's crucial information about the emotional IQ of a potential president, information we had almost no access to until television came along and gave us that tight focus. Reading the transcript of the Lincoln–Douglas debates certainly conveyed the agility of both men's minds, and the ideological differences that separated them. But I suspect they conveyed almost no information about how either man would run a cabinet meeting, or what kind of loyalty they would inspire in their followers, or how they would resolve an internal dispute. Thirty minutes on a talk show, on the other hand, might well convey all that information—because our brains are so adept at picking up those emotional cues. Physically unappealing candidates may not fare as well in this environment. (Lyndon Johnson would have a tough time of it today.) But the candidates who do pass the appearance test are judged by a higher, more discriminating standard—not just the color of their skin, but the content of their character.

That's not to imply that all political debate should be reduced to talk-show banter; there's still plenty of room for position papers and formal speeches. But we shouldn't underestimate the information conveyed by the close-ups of the unscripted television appearance. That first Nixon–Kennedy debate has long been cited as the founding moment of the triumph of image over substance—among all those TV viewers who thought Nixon's sweating and five-o'clock shadow made him look shifty and untrustworthy. But what if we've had it wrong about that debate? What if it wasn't Nixon's lack of makeup that troubled the TV watchers? After all, Nixon did turn out to be shifty and untrustworthy in the end. Perhaps all those voters who thought he had won after they heard the debate on the radio or read the transcript in the papers simply didn't have access to the range of emotional information conveyed by television. Nixon lost on TV because he didn't
look
like someone you would want as president, and where emotional IQ is concerned, looks don't always deceive.

 

R
EALITY PROGRAMMING
and Oprah heart-to-hearts may not be the most sophisticated offering on the televised menu, but neither are they the equivalent of junk food: a guilty pleasure with no redeeming cognitive nourishment. They engage the mind—and particularly the social mind—far more rigorously than the worst shows of past decades. People didn't gather at the water cooler to second-guess the losing strategy on last night's
Battle of the Network Stars,
but they'll spend weeks debating the tactical decisions and personality tics of the
Apprentice
contestants. Consider this one excerpt from an exchange on an unofficial
Apprentice
site: