We are, for the 12th season in a row, watching (a malignant new cast of) Big Brother.
How incredible this Nineteen Eighty-Four-with-a-twist scenario once would have seemed; how ominous.
In Big Brother - which originated as a Dutch show (as Survivor began as a Swedish one) and is now a prime-time hit in close to 70 countries - usually fewer than 15 roommates are locked into a set/house, with no TV or phone, are filmed constantly, and must heed the hokey deep voice of "Big Brother" emanating from loudspeakers in their Ikea-styled terrarium.
Here, the U.S. edition airs three times a week on Global until September; it streams online, and it is, ultimately, a slow-moving soap opera.
No matter how often the increasingly nubile, sexually exhibitionistic housemates dress as, say, giant hot dogs and round third base in the hot tub, the show is fantastically boring, as soap operas are.
Soaps operate in a unique time/space continuum, wherein events happen like lightning: A tired old character suddenly starts dressing in animal costumes, terrorizes the town and turns the gun on himself in the span of five minutes; children age from 1 to 21 in a season; simultaneously, a ponderous matriarch will spend months squinting at the new stranger in town and muttering darkly.
Why do they operate this way? Because we, the wretched viewers, are being force-fed temporal confusion, lest we notice our lives are slipping away "like sands through the hourglass," to quote the opening voice-over for Days of Our Lives.
Additionally, while the bursts of action are nice EKGs (still beating!), the mundane stretches are soothing - people once enjoyed watching the pneumatic and vacant Raquel Welch being transported through a bloodstream in Fantastic Voyage for similar reasons. It is nice to dress up, and absorb, effectively, one's own quite common banality.
What's that? Think your life is more interesting? Film a day. Between, as Lord Byron observed, the sleeping, the eating, the dressing, the grooming and so on, one lives the life of a "dormouse."
This summer, however, there has been a controversy on Big Brother 12, one that has delivered a few genuinely intriguing occasions to wake from our somnambulist stupor and shriek, like Rosemary, the Devil's girlfriend in Rosemary's Baby, "This is no dream! This is really happening!"
In 2002, as foreplay, contestant Justin Sebik drew a knife across a fellow competitor's neck. "Would you be mad if I killed you?" he panted, and was promptly turfed from the show. Other housemates have used shockingly racist and deeply offensive language, and have been castigated, yet allowed to stay. Another gamer, Scott Weintraub, went Defcon 3 in 2003, and was expelled after screaming and breaking crockery.
Now, contestant Matt Hoffman, a soi-disant genius (the travesty that is Mensa means a great deal to simpletons), is in the news for having lied to "the hamsters" (so the hard-core fans call the housemates) about his wife having melorheostosis, a rare progressive disorder he claimed he wanted to rectify when he won.
It is a smart and stupid move, reminiscent of the Survivor gambit of Jonny Fairplay (Jon Dalton), who told the islanders his grandmother had died and who milked the lie for special privileges. But Hoffman's is meaner and lacking in context.
Dalton was a showy player, a professional wrestler, working a persona that the WWE and its ilk have long sanctioned as a surefire way of creating crowd displeasure (that is, excitement).
Hoffman doesn't have the charisma nor the persona to bear the weight of the con.
Melorheostosis is a disorder that is agonizing; it causes deformity and may lead to amputations. Hoffman's wife was in on the con, and wrote him a letter that he read to his 11 new friends, confirming the tale.
She was then cornered by an angry media, fuelled by the complaints of outraged actual sufferers of the disease, and unconvincingly explained that her husband was an eccentric, but not malevolent.
She is a funny-looking little creature too: Is Hoffman projecting, on some level?
This may seem to many all very tempest-in-a-teapot, but incidents like this on TV change TV. Think of the first time you heard swearing on a show; think of the Seinfeld episode where George's fiancée died, an event the characters took so lightly that a furious commentary was ignited. Increasingly, we become inured to shock and outrage, more and more estranged from the very people we are observing.
I believe it is a sin to lie about one's loved ones; at the very least, it is very bad form to involve others in one's avaricious untruths.
I also believe it is shameful to spend a summer crawling through hot caramel and eating offal under surveillance for scant fame and some cash.
Hoffman's lie could clarify a great deal about television reality.
It's too bad he has no presence (he is a shifty-eyed, crotch-fondling troll); it is too bad he didn't blow up the game with a bigger, badder lie, such as, "I just want to get my dad's vestigial breasts lifted!" Or, "To me, winning equals Waco II."
But that would be funny, and a lot less comforting and bland than life, as we see it each summer, and worse, every single second of every day.