Why Do We Love Reality TV but Avoid Documentary Movies?

Here's a paradox for you. During any given week, about half of the top 20 most-watched TV shows are reality programs like Survivor or Hell's Kitchen, or news shows like 60 Minutes. People love reality programs. Yet when it comes to reality movies -- aka documentaries -- the box office is tiny. Why do people love real life when it's on TV but not when it's in the movies?

This is an especially vexing question for the distributors trying to get people to watch widely acclaimed docs like the upcoming American Teen -- one of the best movies of any kind that I've seen all year, and I'm certainly not the only one who feels that way. Once people see it, they're bound to enjoy the drama, angst, and hilarity of Midwestern teenage life. But how do you get them into the theaters when they're so used to skipping documentary fare? And why is skipping it the trend in the first place?

Let's look at some possible explanations:

Reality TV is trashy; documentaries are sophisticated.
That's a blanket generalization, but it holds true a great deal of the time. Much of reality TV is not very deep. We may get caught up in it, but we know it's generally light, unfulfilling junk food. Theatrical documentaries, however, are perceived as being "educational." Even though a lot of them are as funny or entertaining as anything else in theaters, they still have that reputation. Which brings us to the next point...

TV is free; movies cost money.
Not only are reality TV shows shallow, but they're free, too. If you had to pay to watch them, you probably wouldn't. A lot of them are guilty pleasures, things you watch to relax and unwind in the evenings. A movie, on the other hand, costs $8 or more, and you gotta leave the house to watch it. It's a chore. When most people go to that kind of trouble and expense, they want to see a movie that's familiar, something they're sure will entertain them, and most people just don't have much experience with documentaries.

Documentaries are usually more real.
Part of the fun of reality TV shows is how contrived they are. The people on Survivor only act the way they do because they're in a contest. The Real World is nothing like the real world, because strangers that diverse would never live together. Almost everything about reality TV is manufactured in some way -- and we like it. Watching a bunch of ants crawl around in the dirt is boring. But if you put red ants and black ants together in a jar and watch them fight, that's fun. Movie documentaries are generally more legitimately real, with less interference from the filmmakers. The idea is usually to truly capture a story, not to force it to happen. Hence, the results are not as reliably entertaining.

Reality TV is lighthearted.
There are very few moments on reality TV shows that are genuinely serious or sad. Oh, there's drama, all right -- drama over which skank slept with which man-whore, or how Lauren on The Hills got a pimple on the night of her big date, or whatever. Documentaries are often about dire, sobering topics. They're compelling, but they're exactly the opposite of the kind of thing most people want to see at the movies on a Friday night.

I suspect that apart from the occasional breakout hit, theatrical documentaries will always be viewed by far fewer people than reality TV shows are. A fantastic box office score for a doc -- enough to make it one of the top 10 docs of all time -- would translate into only one or two million audience members; meanwhile, 10 million people watch Survivor every week. That's why it's crucial that people tell their friends when they see a great documentary, to spread the word and help overcome the inertia. I promise, if you see American Teen when it opens this summer, you'll get more enjoyment out of it than an entire season of Project Runway.

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Eric D. Snider (website) is not a fan of reality -- not just reality TV shows, but reality in general.

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