The George W. Bush era is back, at least in some cultural sense. On retail playlists in America’s hipper precincts, the top 40 hits of the 1980s and 1990s are replaced by indie rock from the halcyon days of Pitchfork. The vapid, hot-person romantic comedy sits perched once more atop the box office. Waistlines have receded to latitudes that recall Paris Hilton in her prime.
Like most waves of nostalgia, this one serves more as a self-justifying mirror for our current beliefs than any real examination of recent history. A political climate that saw the largest anti-war protests in history becomes the waning days of sleepy, pre-Trump “uniparty” hegemony. The chaotic, money-soaked cultural recklessness chronicled in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom is repackaged as TikTok-friendly “indie sleaze” (and inevitably set to the period’s most godawful music). The advent of the Kardashians and the Real Housewives becomes the Genesis moment for reality television, eclipsing The Real World and its fellow early experiments in the medium.
At the fraught midpoint of this transformation into beings whose concept of self is rooted in media reproduction sits the wave of “reality” dating shows produced by MTV in the early-to-mid-2000s, some of the most stilted, awkward, scripted, and yet somehow still nakedly inhumane television programming ever produced by man. You may remember these programs — Next, Room Raiders, and Parental Control — from the desultory after-school afternoons that their reruns endlessly pockmarked or their use as televisual filler in the wee hours of the morning after MTV finally decided to pour dirt on its titular music-video programming for good.
These were ostensibly “game shows,” with gimmicky premises, rules, and prizes, but they were really something else: training grounds for the modern mind. These programs are painfully, obviously scripted by mad scientist-like producers. You can sense the presence of a cynical, wise-ass 30-something in Manhattan sticking a metaphorical arm up these blond Bush-era naïfs’ behinds and making them talk. To watch the progression of these shows over a decade is to see said naïfs learn to play their roles very well without assistance.
Before exploring the Bush-era wave of MTV dating programming, it’s worth sparing a thought for Singled Out, its smash-hit 1990s predecessor. A show that comes very close to making the concept of a “cattle call” literal, its premise is that a judge of either sex gradually pares down a pool of 50 possible suitors without actually seeing them, based on their responses to surveys and game show challenges. Men inevitably play up their machismo, women their sex-kitten attitude or eagerness to please. It is mind-bogglingly predictable, very silly, and undeniably entertaining.
This is largely due to the ’90s-vintage snarkiness of hosts Chris Hardwick and Jenny McCarthy, both of whom would go on to varying degrees of success (and, in the case of the latter, infamy as an anti-vaccination activist). By the time MTV’s first wave of reality-era dating programming rolled around, the hosts were jettisoned entirely, turning a tongue-in-cheek exercise in cultural and romantic role-playing into play-acting.
The ne plus ultra example of this came with one of their earliest efforts at the format, 2001’s DisMissed. The program features one suitor taking on two dates at the same time, ultimately rejecting one after sufficient time has been spent together to make a judgment. Unlike its more celebrated successors, this show is quite difficult to find today. And for good reason, as it is excruciating.
However, one episode that lingers as an upload on YouTube provides an instructive example of what happened in the 2000s when the line between the authors and objects of this lowbrow cultural mythmaking was obliterated. An affable, vaguely doofus-y 22-year-old named Brad courts Lisa, a quintessential girl-next-door type, and Georgina, a self-described “innocent Catholic school girl” with a “wild side … underneath [her] skirt.” Her failed attempt to role-play as a firecracker-dominatrix type inspires a level of fourth-wall-breaking cringing from the other contestants that threatens the program’s very conceptual integrity.
The infinitely more popular Next and Room Raiders fared better on a basic level as entertainment, largely due to the apparent realization by MTV’s powers-that-be that your average American 22-year-old was not (yet) the most convincing actor for their ersatz morality plays. Next is the more mean-spirited of the two, in which a group of possible suitors rides around in a bus all day as one paramour of the opposite sex feels each one out. For each minute that passes, the would-be suitors earn a dollar, with the option at the end of a successful date to schedule a second one or take the money and split.
This is, of course, an invitation to humiliation, and contestants are frequently rejected after earning less than the price of a subway fare for offenses like being too short or looking like a specific iteration of Britney Spears. The latter is an actual example cited by one memorably horrible man featured on the show in 2008. But on that very same episode, the girls hopefully waiting to romance him level insults at each other that, scripted or not, sound totally shocking to modern ears accustomed to more smiley-face girl-power programming: “Look at that skinny body of yours, are you anorexic, girl?” one accosts the other, invoking a few-and-far-between genuine emotional reaction of shock from her rival.
As the genre rocketed to the center of the American cultural consciousness in 2005, n+1 co-founder Mark Greif wrote that while “everyone tries to play someone else on TV,” there are still “so many tethering strings from the prosaic, deficient, and plain polite that conformity becomes chaotic and imitation idiosyncratic.” While he might have been correct at that time, the thesis reached its breaking point with the later wave of MTV dating shows, in particular one nasty piece of work called Parental Control.
Parental Control strains the limits of the simulacrum, starting with its somewhat fundamentalist yet prurient premise: Parents who are dissatisfied with their school-age child’s current boyfriend or girlfriend audition a group of rivals, who the teenager then dates before being prompted to make a decision between them or the person who was not chosen by their parents (read: MTV producers). As contrived as that is, the show itself is even more apparently fictional. One former contestant wrote in an amusing Medium post that “nearly everything the parents and the boyfriend said were given to them by the producers” as they surveilled the “dates” in progress each episode.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The result is something certifiably wicked. One episode from 2010 I viewed in researching this piece is a particularly nightmarish vision of “reality”-mediated insult comedy that resembles the uber-cynical 1990s staple Married … With Children more than anything resembling normal human interaction. Although some of these MTV staples were more endearing — such as Room Raiders, in which the mortifying premise of a man or woman inspecting their suitors’ bedrooms before meeting them is transmogrified into an amusing shared acknowledgment of how inevitably humiliating this would be, for anyone — most fall in a liminal zone beyond that show’s “good” or Parental Control’s “utterly evil.” They ultimately serve as moralistic programming about what it is to “be” a “man” or “woman,” or rather, a good MTV consumer.
The instructive nature of the form of these shows supersedes anything of its content. One needs look no further than the actual thoughts, statements, and attitudes of the under-25s featured on these series to understand that, as scripted as they might have been: They are all incredibly horny, objectifying each other in vintage MTV salacious style and in stark contrast with the sex-recessive private lives of their modern-day counterparts. As painfully cringeworthy and spiritually false as the Bush era’s slate of dating “reality” might have been, to revisit its actual texture is instructive in identifying the difference between the actual 2000s and its current-day simulacrum. The form has, in the private lives of so many screen-addicted people, young and old, replaced the content: You can look, and look, and look, but you can’t touch.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.