By Morgan Rowland, AEC News Staff
In the 1960s there was a game show that for a while was one of the most popular ones in the country. It was called Queen for A Day. Sounds like a nice show, right? Wrong. This show is one of the television industry's best kept secrets. Its awfulness is a hidden fact.
How the show worked is that they took poor women, sick women, grieving women, women with sick kids and every other struggling person that they could find and had them come on the show and tell their stories.
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After that the audience voted and whoever's life they deemed to be the worst was crowned Queen for A Day. That sounds awful but when you think about it it isn’t much different from a lot of modern reality television and game shows. Things like America’s Got Talent, American Idol etc, etc love a good sob story and many people are forced to exploit their pain to get sympathy from the judges to better their chance of winning and getting life changing money. Same goes for reality competition shows like Survivor where the contestants voluntarily put their lives at risk of getting sun poisoning, salt poisoning, heat stroke, starvation, dysentery and more. In one episode after a particularly hard challenge 3 people had heat stroke and one had to be taken off the island by helicopter. But that poses the question that living in a society where money is everything, is it ethical to make people backstab, doublecross, and screw over others just as desperate as them for a million dollars?
I don’t think it is. If there is a present threat to your life and you are forced to do something awful you can be held legally responsible because you didn’t willingly do these things, consent was not given. So with the ever present threat of starvation, exploitation and in some cases death from lack of resources I don’t believe it’s possible for these shows to be consensual especially since oftentimes how much money it cost to make the show could change everyone's lives. I’m not the first one to notice that a lot of people's problem with reality TV is that the people act absurd and that it’s scripted and while both of these things are true it needs to be asked why. The reason being is that the average American viewer likes drama and betrayal and grown adults acting like idiots because it’s entertaining and the people on these shows know it. That the best way to succeed is to make fools out of themselves and even if they get branded as the idiot from that one show it doesn’t matter because the one the show and even if they didn’t the opportunities they got from it are worth more than how the world views them. This is what Reality TV and game shows force people to do, compromise yourself as a person and perform and act and exploit yourself and allow yourself to be exploited to make a lump sum after taxes the studio head probably make 5 times than in a year.
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