Reality Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be

My son spent most of the first seven months of his life crying. Colic, they said. Those months have now made it possible to determine my age by counting the lines under my eyes, like a tree. But if it weren't for his crying, my family and I wouldn't have made our first appearance on reality television.

A new TLC show was interested in filming us, so others could see what we were going through and how we cope, and maybe use what they learn to help themselves. In reality, no matter how bad things are, as a parent, all you can do is do. You just do what you have to. Or you can crack. But that advice would make for an uninteresting show, and we really wanted to be on TV, so we agreed.

"Reality" isn't the best word to describe what qualifies as reality television. "Reality" implies that what you are seeing is a slice of the real world. From the beginning, however, what we did was nothing like the reality that we lived every day.

In preparation for the show, we had our families come over to help us clean the house. Our house was brand new when we moved into it, and even then it wasn't as clean as it was the night before TLC came. What the house looked like was nothing like reality.

Then there was the candid interview with my wife and I standing in the kitchen, leisurely enjoying a cup of coffee by the counter (something we hadn't done since our first child). Except we couldn't have coffee because we were miked and the sounds that your stomach makes while drinking coffee would be audible. So we started to drink a mug of ice water as we began fielding the questions from the director (yes, there was a director). Then we had to cut because the clinking of the ice in the cups was too loud. When we began to answer the same question for the third time, we had to cut again so they could put a band-aid on my wedding ring. They wouldn't let me take it off, but I was clinking it against the cup.

The interview continued after these kinks were ironed out. We then went on a roll, answering questions with much more care and precision than we would normally use. I was OK, but my wife was great. In fact, there were times when she was downright eloquent. "Cut," the director would say. "Say that again. Bob (the camera guy), get a close up on her for that."

Instantly I began a revisionist history of reality television. How many of my favorite moments had been done on multiple takes? Did the director yell "Cut!" when Sue was giving her snake and rat speech on the first season of "Survivor?" How many takes did it take to kick Puck off of "The Real World?"

Then there was the edited version of the show. There were four other families showcased during our episode. One was a Canadian woman of Pakistani decent whose husband took frequent business trips. She talked about her concern with being a Muslim woman alone in post-9/11 America, and about how she rarely left the house with her daughter because of the looks she got. Then they cut to footage of the woman taking her child for a walk. Another woman walks past her, and a second later that woman does a double take. A perfect illustration of the mom's concern--except the passer-by was one of the show's producers.

But the biggest alteration of reality was what we had to do to my son. The day the cameras arrived happened to be the best day of his life (up to that point). He was cooing, smiling, laughing--no crying whatsoever. That didn't work for the show, so we had to do things (I won't go into specifics, but pain wasn't involved) to make him cry. It worked. They had their footage. And my son has a story to tell his therapist in about twenty years.

Perhaps I was naive to think that the "reality" of reality television had anything to do with the real world. All the word means is that the characters don't get paid. I learned that from the show too.