Reality television series have taken us everywhere — from divorce courts to matchmakers offices, weight-loss clinics to four-star restaurants, maternity wards full of crying children to the Jersey shore.
But leave it to the French to boldly go where no Real Housewife has gone before. This week’s premiere of the reality show “Zone Xtreme” featured a studio audience electrocuting a contestant who couldn’t answer questions posed to him by the host.
Well, not exactly …
“Zone Xtreme,” you see, was a fake reality show (as opposed, say, to “Flavor of Love”). The show, complete with pulsating game-show music and a comely co-host, was actually a set-up for a documentary being filmed to view the reactions of the 80 members of the studio audience. The “contestant,” who presumably “died” after being shocked into submission, was an actor.
If the premise sounds familiar, then you vaguely remember the work of Yale University psychologist Stanley Millgram, who conducted a study in 1961 to see whether experiment volunteers would willingly send a shock to an unseen individual. The French “game show” turned it up a few levels by having the audience members watch what happened.
Although 16 people walked out, 64 audience members stayed – including one woman whose grandparents had been tortured by the Nazis, and another who said she kept hitting the buzzer (which increased the level of the shock) because she was “afraid to ruin the program.”
You know …
We like to think we’re better that the people we see duped on television. Put in the same circumstances, we’d like to think we would be among the 16 who walked away. Even if it meant we weren’t going to be on TV.
But evidence to the contrary is all around us — from game-show contestants who squeal with delight when they’re told to “come on down” to those who willing tell their most intimate secrets on panel shows to those willing to expose themselves to ridicule on series such as “The Bachelor” or “The Marriage Ref.”
Much of our culture has become numb to the idea of thinking for ourselves. Some things really don’t add up — no matter how much money we could win or fame we could achieve. And following a TV host’s every word because … well … they entertain us or soothe us or tell us what we want to hear, just might be robbing us of our individual and communal ability to reason.
We can laugh at the French documentary experiment. We can find it distasteful. But we also know that a similar “show” conducted on American television would find just as many audience members willing to electrocute a contestant not as smart as a fifth-grader.
In between beer commercials.
