1D TV

So on a rare Friday evening at home in the even more rare moment for me of channel surfing, I run across Fox and think I see a familiar face.  I turn back, only to realize it really is a familiar face.  The new “reality soap” titled “Nashville” (clever marketing!) is featuring a twentysomething guy who at one time went to our church.  I’ve had an interesting run of people I know making it onto TV in the past couple of years.  It started with a girl from Alabama who occasionally attended our church there turning up on “Temptation Island,”  (let’s just say that she apparently didn’t remember much of what we taught), proceeded to a current college student in our ministry ending up on the very last Bob-Barker-hosted episode of “The Price is Right” (her sister was the bigger fan, but she is the more outgoing one and did a “backflip for Bob”…I think she won some jewelry) and then a youth minister friend of mine was spotted in an airport by a producer who noted that he was a “big boy.”  So Shane Sisk, whose great big heart was on display for the cameras that somehow also missed his amazing sense of humor, was voted off at the end of the very first episode of “Fat March” that aired about a month ago.  Maybe the end result of all these near-connections to stardom will mean that I’m getting closer to my dream of being on Jeopardy!  Tanya says that bringing home some serious cash is the only constructive use for all the useless trivia that I have floating around in my head.  I just want the chance to talk to Alex like the Sean-Connery-impersonator from Saturday Night Live.  But I digress…

 So I watch all of fifteen minutes of this episode and it may be one of the worst TV shows ever.  It’s a reality show that totally looks and feels scripted.  And since these people aren’t professional actors, it feels even more fake.  It’s so predictable that I watched the sixty-second “This season on Nashville…” teaser at the end and I could accurately tell you the entire story arch for the season because it’s nothing more than your usual cliches about a group of good-looking twentysomethings trying to “make it” in more ways than one.  And two thoughts occured to me.  First, I’m going to meet even more waiters and waitresses at the Waffle House in coming years who tell me that they came to Nashville to try to make it in the music business.  There are great teenagers out there who live in perfectly fine communities who will watch this and think “hey, that looks like fun, I’m going to go to Nashville someday and hang out with incredibly good-looking people and record company executives.”  And a chase for fifteen minutes of fleeting fame will lead them down a road of broken dreams that weren’t the right dreams for their life to begin with. 

Thought #2.  I know Clint.  He’s the guy I know on the show.  He’s a guy that I’ve taken to lunch, met with in my office, even been on a mission trip to Chicago with.  His life has a story.  A story that includes some very real human themes – insecurity, struggle, pain, God, hope.  And what the producers of “Nashville” have reduced him to is a one-dimensional rich playboy who flirts with all the girls and is considered a schmuck by the rest of the guys.  I wanted to scream at the TV, “I know Clint and he’s so much more than this!”  Whether he set himself up for this or was edited by producers looking to fill a stale stereotype is not my point.  The fact that our world tries to reduce us to “less” than we truly are does.  I maybe be hopelessly old school, but I believe in my bones that we were created to constantly become more, not less in life.  As we go, our story should become richer, deeper, more layered, even more dramatic as we discover who we truly are and the role we are to play and have to confront all the forces in this life that try to keep us from those very things. 

If you are reading this, please do me the favor of turning off your television because this is not “reality.”  But your spouse who would rather know the story of your day instead of watching a fake version of someone else’s day, is.  And your kids sitting next to you who need a parent who plays with them and tells them crazy bedtime stories and takes them to the park, are.  And your neighbor that you keep thinking you haven’t had the time to meet yet, is.

I’ve been reading some G.K. Chesterton recently, a guy known as the “prophet of mirth.”  And he came to the point of being so amazed by the beauty of even the most average aspects of everyday life that he penned this:

Here dies another day

During which I have had eyes, ears, hands

And the great world round me;

And with tomorrow I begin another.

Why am I allowed two?