The Sonic BOOMER
OK, I admit it. I’ve gotten roped into watching “reality” TV shows — something I swore I’d never waste my time on.
I was channel-surfing one night two years ago when I happened across a show where men and women fall in love with someone they’ve met online. The person is in another country, often thousands of miles away, and it never seems to bother either party, until — breaking news! — they decide they’d like to meet each other in person. This international visiting gets to be a financial and scheduling burden and brings a lot of tears with it.
“But it’s so predictable. Didn’t either of them foresee this happening?” I ask myself.
The answer is no. Neither one ever expected relentless online flirting and digitally enhanced seductive poses to lead to desire.
And the drama doesn’t stop there. Once they actually manage to meet, they discover that a) the person doesn’t really look like their digitally enhanced photo, b) the person is hiding something (kids? a spouse? $10,000 in credit card debt?) or c) they hate each other.
The ones who hate each other are the lucky ones. They say sayonara and are on their way. For the romantically compatible ones, it’s months and years of waiting to get a visa that will ultimately give them three months to decide they’re in forever-love and to get married. Since it can take six to eight months to plan a decent wedding, this is another problem.
“But didn’t they know that going in? That they’d have to get engaged before they really got to know the person and then have maybe two weeks left to plan a wedding?”
No, no they didn’t. It’s a mad rush to get everything together, and then we find that a) the room is wrong, b) the dress is wrong and c) the long-distance half of the couple isn’t going to have family in attendance.
More drama — and you know how TV shows hate drama. Sometimes the worst happens and the couple calls the whole thing off. After wasting thousands of dollars in travel expenses, one or both parties are shocked to discover that a) they don’t speak the same language, b) they are not of the same religion or c) there are cultural differences that they simply cannot accept.
Of course, this “worst” outcome is the “best” if you’re a TV producer, allowing you to morph the show into a host of similar shows, then into shows about people watching the show.
“This will never sell,” I tell myself. “Who on earth wants to watch someone else watch TV?”
Well, the people watching the shows are the very same people you’ve been watching all along, so now you’re involved in their home life as well as their romantic life. How’s it going for them?
As I am now completely entwined in these people’s lives, I am worried that the foreigners won’t be able to adapt, worried that the natives won’t give them enough time to do so and, mostly, worried about how Americans are being perceived by the rest of the world. Some of them are such lunkheads!
All in all, I now spend my evenings worrying, but at least the worries are not my own.
