Reality Television

While watching an episode of project runway's latest season, I started wondering why the formula for these sort of shows is so successful. When I was in Amsterdam I spoke to one of my good friends about success and failure and its role in history and how recently success is measured in economical terms.
In these shows success and failure is all we are trained to pay attention to. Winning and losing is the most important part of the episode. Who wins the challenge and who goes home. We start rooting for certain people and start disliking other ones, which is after all what we, humans, have loved to do since the beginning of time. The ironic thing of these shows, American Idol, Project Runway, Top Chef, ect, is that the person who wins the entire competition usually disappears from television, our memory, the general public's eye, as quickly as they rose to fame. So while this show is built on success and failure, the result of this success, the general success itself is less important that what got them there in the first place. The process. What we watch is the rise to success, the road to fame, rather than where they end up, or where they want to end up. Our fascination is with the competition, the tension between the contestants and the challenge itself. Do we ever see the winners of Idols as actual 'Idols'? Or the winners of Project Runway as legit fashion designers comparable to Marc Jacobs and Betsey Johnson? The answer, I think, is no. Perhaps the irony of these shows is that it is exactly the public nature of the process that makes us value the end result less. The mystery of how Madonna and Marc Jacobs rose to fame is part of what makes them who they are. Although it is the road to fame we view as entertaining, like watching gladiators in the arena, it might also be the dirty part we would rather not know once our idols have become precisely that. Untouchable.