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Opinion | 'Rural way of life' reality TV is disappointing to American culture

Andrew Bowman, bowmanaj@muohio.edu

There is an endless amount of pointless television, and it may be hard to believe, but MTV isn't the source of it all. Not all of them are reality shows or animated cartoons created by Seth McFarlane, but nonetheless are still graphic, crude, lewd and mind numbing.

Yet, one genre of television snuck up and is taking up a large amount of space on network stations that are supposed to be about learning. The latest batch of producer concocted shows focus around hillbillies, rednecks and trailer park trash. It's unlikely there is another way to describe the shows in a more politically correct way. Maybe "shows for the rural way of life" might apply but even that is a loaded statement.

Can you name them all? How about just on Animal Planet, Discovery Channel and History Channel? Hillbilly Hand Fishin', Swamp People, Hogs Gone Wild, Call of the Wildman, Ice Road Truckers: Deadliest Roads, Hairy Bikers, Mounted in Alaska, Ax Men and somehow several more.

These shows aren't tearing up the ratings, according to Nielsen's ratings for the week of Oct. 17, since none of them even made it to the top watched 15 cable shows. So why are there so many?

It started with shows like Deadliest Catch, a show about the hard life of crab fishing in Alaska. Survivor Man is another example; it teaches you how to survive if you are ever stranded in different regions. The original shows had some scholastic merit, since they gave viewers information on professions and situations, otherwise unheard of. Then, before we knew it, there was Ice Road Truckers and Ax Men. Yes, just what the American public needs, shows condoning large-scale logging and potential for making a quick buck with the risk of losing your life.

The success of the survival and profession based shows led to the excuse to create the bizarre, Swamp People and Hillbilly Hand Fishin'.

Like many other hours of worthless television, these shows have no merit, and therefore shouldn't be on channels such as Discovery. Allegedly, those channels are supposed to be reserved for science, arts and related fields. Of course, there are other misnomers in television, like MTV's biggest show, Jersey Shore, having nothing to do with music. At least there are animals in most of those shows, even if they do end up dead.

Yet we expect more out of Discovery, History and Animal Planet, with the complete understanding they are businesses. As a business, they know they can make money through pure entertainment rather than thought provoking material. Regardless, we expect them to teach us, take us places and stimulate our creativity, through entertaining means.

This new wave of shows provides no advancement for the progression of the human species. If anything, it retracts from the march of science and technology, a true hallmark to America's innovation. Besides, most of the shows don't affect today's American lives. Hardly any of us need to know how to trap and kill alligators or how to pan for gold. So why are shows about the backwoods way of life continually being created and forcibly consumed?

Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, History Channel, the viewers are disappointed. You had an opportunity to impress by mentally stimulating the population. Instead, you found people even Jerry Springer wouldn't put on his show, stuck a camera in their face and tried to tell us it was educational entertainment. We want Egyptology, not real life examples of Jeff Foxworthy jokes.


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