'Reality' TV continues down fake-street

I’ve done some stupid stuff.

Most involved alcohol or testosterone, and I’d like to think that’s all in my past.

I’m older and wiser now, no longer the guy who says “Hold my beer and watch this,” but instead the guy who holds the beer and watches.

Sadly, most of what I watch now is on television.

And it just seems to keep getting stupider.

Naked and Afraid, apparently, wasn’t dumb enough. An hour a week of two buck naked strangers trying to survive for 21 days in the wilderness was so compelling that the Discovery Channel decided to go a step further and offer Darkness.

The premise is simple. Three strangers drop into a cave or abandoned mine in different locations and have six days to find each other and work their way out. They have no light, and little food and water.

Unlike Naked and Afraid, these idiots are clothed, although who can tell? It’s shot in the dark.

And unlike Naked and Afraid, whose winning contestants are awarded $5,000 for their misery, the winners on Darkness receive nothing. They’re just in it for the challenge. (Kind of like President Trump, himself a former reality television star, who when elected vowed not to accept a salary.)

There was a time, not so long ago, when professional actors performed on the shows we watched on TV. But that was back when television was free. Now we pay to watch everyday folk suffer through heat and cold and bug bites and even darkness, all in the name of entertainment.

We’re constantly reminded by the narrators of these shows that the contestants are in grave danger of heat stroke, snakebite, disease and any manner of horrible death at any moment. But it never happens. It’s like watching a NASCAR race without the crashes.

There’s something phony going on, but we can’t stop watching. We hold out hope that something horrible will happen and after an hour of watching we realize that it already has.

The promotional material for Darkness mentions the risk of hallucinations, hypothermia and fatal falls. There’s a good chance one of the contestants will hallucinate and get cold, but I’m betting no one will die.

That would be real. These shows aren’t. They’re like professional wrestling, which back in the day we all knew was fake.

Or most of us did anyway.

There just seem to be a lot more people who can’t tell the difference these days.

Parker Heinlein is [email protected].