Total Divas: Realer than Real

Admittedly I’m not a huge reality TV watcher.  I have a few staples I do “keep up” with.  The Challenge, cause at this point all they need is a draft special and it will be a full blown great American sport, and I run a Challenge Fantasy league.  The Real World, which I only tend to watch the first 3 episodes of purely to see what the Challenge league has coming in for rookies.  And cooking reality shows, which I only watch two of; Restaurant Impossible and Chopped.  So to reiterate, I’m not extremely well versed. I missed the Jersey Shore craze, the Kardashian show makes me want to drink till I go blind, and any show exploiting children; i.e. Toddlers and Tiaras, makes me want to move to an island away from the humans that enjoy destroying the future like this.  But Total Divas has piqued my intrigue.  I think I’m confounded by the sheer layers of meta-ness this sort of show would bring.

For one, it doesn’t really fit the 3 major categories that my fellow Rooker already broke down so well, so I’m just going to quote him to remind you. And if you haven’t read his Real World article you most definitely should.

1) Reality-based Job: Pawn Ice Road Ax Ducks

2) Reality-based Competition: Dancing with the American Top Voice

3) Drunk/Morally Vacant People: The Real Bad Girls of the Jersey Shore

Its kind of a mix of all 3.  This is what interests me.  Because yes, it’s a glimpse into the working life of certain individuals, but unlike most of those shows, these people have an organic competition existing already in their job.  And do I need to qualify the third category.  Have you seen wrestling.  I love the WWE but the Divas are not usually the deepest running waters.  So that’s the first part that grabs my attention.

The second is a little less obvious, so bear with me.  I’ve come to realize, that wrestling in itself is some heightened and extreme version of reality TV.  Most veterans in wrestling eventually skew away from the outlandish gimmicks and tend to trend towards simply playing caricatures of their own personalities. If you’ve ever seen the Punk’d episode with Stone Cold Steve Austin you’ll realize he’s not far from his in ring personality.  And in their business they’re supposed to give a feel of a real fights, with real feuds, all the while having producers just guide them in certain directions.  Probably not known to most people, but even though matches are predetermined, the rest of the match is improvised with a few planned “spots” and at any minute they can get the word that the match ending could change.  I mean this is essentially what reality TV has become.  Producers of shows like the Real World will coax and prod certain situations to help build drama and sometimes throw fuel on the fire.  I mean maybe wrestlings just been hip to this sort of thing for a long time.  So there’s this added layer of the Divas existing in a reality show type of job, and also being on an actual reality show.  Throw in the fact that their job is essentially to play up small portions of their personalities, not unlike current would be reality stars, to gain fame and fandom.  I mean this season of the Real World has someone referring to herself as “Hurricane Nia”.  She essentially is a wrestling personality already (maybe this is why its falling off as the show is veering closer to the more veteran-ed field of companies like the WWE)

So to zoom back out and give the really big picture, you have Divas, that for work compete night in and night out for a living, and their competition is somewhat directed by producers somewhere,  and their success is based on ability but also on likability or unlikability through trumping up some portions of their personality.  And now you’re going to film them behind the scenes for this, which again is another opportunity for them to make a name for themselves, as they play to those cameras.  The result is mentally draining to keep up with, but has the recipe to break some real fourth wall boundaries via another fourth wall.  And I think there’s good chance someone might come out of this as a real sociopath.   Imagine these people already have to “play” themselves for a living, and now there will be no reprieve from “playing” some version of someone thats not fully them but not completely made up.  There will be shit talking in the ring that’s “scripted” and then “real” shit talking on the show, that may or may not be scripted.  Back stabbing in the ring that very well could align with “actual” back stabbing.  Honestly I think Vince MacMahon is a genius.  The layering of two supremely fake entities that attempt to portray themselves as real, might actually equate to something beyond real. He has a man who normally could care less about reality TV wanting to check this out.  You win WWE. Please take more of my attention.

 

The Real World article referenced above

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