Reality television is one of the most loathesome things to happen to television programming. The whole show is engineered to continually feed into the viewer’s naiveté and curiosity. Each break is set up as a cliffhanger and the constant camera view switching is the same trick movies frequently use in the opening scenes to grab the viewer’s attention. Except reality shows do it throughout the entire program. The whole genre is designed to use your brain’s survival programming to suck you into paying attention. And it works. Of course it works.

The only way to avoid being sucked in is to not turn it on but it is so prolific it is nearly impossible to avoid if you are flipping through channels on regular cable. Hell my girlfriend was watching a ten minute short of reality television on her phone, I couldn’t see the screen only hear the music and the dialog, and just that was enough to completely sap my focus from the task at hand. I had to leave the room until it was over.

Credit where it is due, reality television programs are insidiously and ingeniously using psychology to draw an audience in. And keep them attached. It plays like a psychological addiction and that realization is the most disturbing of all.