The Show (a short story)

No one remembers anymore what the Show was about. We’re pretty sure it’s a reality program; when the Show was first aired, reality tv was the only kind of programming that achieved consistent ratings. This is just before the networks dumped all other kinds of programming, including news, in favor of an all-reality format. There's still some paid programming on in the wee hours of the morning, but 30-minute advertisements for kitchen detritus are really their own special kind of reality programming.

And so no one remembers anymore what the Show was about. The last original producer died years ago, and he refused to divulge the Show's content because he thought it was poetically just that America had hypnotized itself rapt over a Show that had become completely devoid of substance. He, the last living original producer, believed that America would not come out of its trance until a few viewers woke up and realized that the program they had been wasting their lives glued to was the artistic equivalent of watching static, listening to white noise, for an hour every evening, 7 days a week.

It all started shortly after Great Depression II set in, when the government offered huge cash incentives for any prime-time programming aimed at creating feelings of comfort and community within the viewer. There was a direct correlation, aided by a complex proprietary algorithm, between the broadness of a program's calculated target demographic and the percentage of the program's budget that would then be sponsored by the U.S. government.

Program ‘A’, for example, might only be calculated to target men aged 25 - 45, and after that demo is plugged in to the algorithm, yield an assistance package of 25% of the show's budget. If however, after your initial assessment, you could find some way to convince the auditors that you have expanded the demo to men and women across races, aged 18 - 50, then you might get an allocation for more than 70% of your budget.

This system produced results that were predicted by every tv critic's farewell column for 3 consecutive years; namely, that tv would become a nightmare landscape of pleasant white propaganda, possibly ruined forever as an artistic canvas. And then there were no more tv critics.

A lucky few filled open film critic spots, and most of the rest took pay cuts and ended up in their publications' editing rooms.

But there's still the matter of a certain Show, whose producers decided they had enough money to ignore the government's subsidies (and therefore, their programming guidelines), but not enough money to step outside the sphere of reality programming, reality programming being the only thing a perversely single-minded public would accept.

The producers put together a reality show that would indeed draw criticism, and probably not inspire too many happy feelings, but, they were hoping, would capture the taste preferences of the large-ish flock of bored American viewers that must certainly exist by now.

Maybe the Show was something simple, like a first-person perspective of on-the-job fireman. Or maybe it was something more seamy, like following real swinging married couples through an average day (though not into the bedroom). Either way, there were phone calls placed, and though the new "permissive" FCC of the Obama administration would not penalize the network based on caller complaints, it most definitely demanded certain kinds of censoring if the network wanted to avoid heavy "capital donations", or what used to be called "fines".

The first thing to get blurred by the censors was the steady stream of upsetting hand gestures being used by the Show's principals, from the occasional flipped bird to the extraordinarily disturbing (for an over-pacified public) threats of physical violence.

The producers thought they were out of the woods when a previously sated viewership began calling the FCC en gros masse to whine about the aggressive language. There had been no "cursing", as it is traditionally thought of, but words like "hate", "screw", and "shoot!" began to get bleeped. The timid versions of those words given to the reality cast for common use also got bleeped, once FCC callers started saying, "you can still tell they're angry."

Next, the censors determined a decibel level, above which any direct speech or ambient background sounds would be bleeped. In one notorious episode, two of the reality cast attempted to have a conversation by yelling because they were standing in front of an operational oil derrick. The whole 3-minute scene was presented as one long bleep with moving images, whose faces and necks were blurred, so that no one could tell they were yelling.

Just when the producers were about to give up all hope and cancel their endeavor (though their ratings made small, steady progress with each incline in censorship), they had a windfall. The Nielsen returns for the episode immediately following the notorious oil derrick incident set a new plateau for their ratings, comfortably above the highest previous point in the life of their 2-year-old Show.

In a last, desperate attempt to capitalize on their unsubsidized gamble, they began to bleep sound that did not require bleeping, and to blur images which required no blurring. They bleeped a conversation about fruit. They blurred the face of a baby. Every instance of the word “breakfast”. An empty billboard. An unadorned t-shirt. Laughter.

Another direct correlation developed: the less of the Show that the viewer could actually perceive or understand, the higher the ratings got. This amounted to proof, in the minds of the producers, that a certain grim truth about the American psyche had taken hold of the medium. However disturbed the producers were by this confrontation, they were not disgusted enough to turn their backs on a windfall, especially not one that was clearly so deserved by such a catastrophically sensitive public.

Eventually, the Show topped out at 90 share and stayed there, and the original producers obtained a perpetual contract for the Show from their network, and then sold the Show for untold billions of dollars and retired to a life of decadent playboy-ishness (presumably).

And eventually, they both died, taking the secret of the Show's content to their graves, and leaving behind a confidentiality clause for the Show's constantly rotating reality cast that promised harsh financial penalties if broken.

An now 90% of the American viewing public watches a Show for an hour every evening, 7 days a week, whose only audible dialogue is conjunctions, and whose only decipherable faces are smiling.