September 28, 2005
Busman's Holiday (slight returns)
On the shuttle from Los Angeles, a man in business casual made effective use of tarmac time via mobile phone, spread some enthusiastic positive cheer among a couple contacts. He was perhaps thirtyfive, good-looking in a blandish way, and when it was time to shut off electronic devices he turned to flirting genially with the flight attendants. He was pretty good at all of this.
Once we hit altitude, he cracked open his computer and watched an episode of The Apprentice on dvd; that much I could see from my seat, though not which season or etc. Given what I knew about him: his faith in charm and people skills, his carefully-smoothed drive, his refusal to waste a minute, his — to get to the heart of the matter — total elision of leisure and biz...given all this, it was hard to understand his viewing choice as anything but dual-purpose. Sure, he was in it for the "entertainment," the diversion for the length of the flight (LAX-OAK, as it happpens, is almost exactly the length of an hour program with the commercials dumped: 48-52 min, depending on show). But he was also studying. He was pursuing his education in junior-executage.
This is perhaps obvious, but hadn't really struck me before with such force: that watching The Appprentice, even if one is certain one is just mordantly amused by the cravenness and the "drama" in the abstract, is just watching work, viewing a loosely-idealized allegory of one's own labor life, with scheduled lessons in how-to-get-ahead. Many viewers probably don't think they're engaging in continuing education; some, I am now pretty sure, do. And I think they're the ones who get it: that the winning appeal of the show is that it counts double. It's entertainment that counts as prep, or vice versa; the return of Dale Carnegie books packaged as amusement.
And in this way it's a substantial increment of progress, of a sort. About the victory of leisure over play (in which television takes a historic role), about the putting of "free time" in the service of being a better, more refreshed laborer, much has been written. Nor is the idea particularly new that cultural entertainments often serve to educate and prepare people for a certain kind of work life. Still, The Apprentice seems like a next chapter in this history, in which leisure abandons even its pretence and agreeably takes the aspect of homework.
Is this true of "reality programming" in general?
Posted by jane at September 28, 2005 09:20 AM | TrackBack