‘Extreme’ reality TV shows turn viewers off

With so many new shows vying for viewers’ avid, rabid attention each TV season, TV producers are coming up with far-out programs that go beyond the required “surprise” factor, and end up shocking the global audience!

Last year, viewers were thrown for a loop by “survivor” programs in which the protagonists were butt-naked! It was all too neo-Adam and Eve for some viewers, so the shows had to fuzz up intimate body parts whenever they peeped out in all their graphic glory.

This season, the “naked” motif has been extended to create another new reality challenge, “Dating Naked.” That’s right, the participants in its unusual version of the old dating game on television get to know each other on intimate rendezvous or assignations in their birthday suits—what you see is what you get!

We find this twist instructive because it runs counter to the usual dating process, in which the searchers and searchees try to put their best foot forward, glossing over their imperfections by trying to come across as paragons of perfection in every aspect of their existence.

In “Dating Naked,” all romantic illusions are rendered moot and academic as the players present their real selves—warts, love handles, freckles and all!

Candid and refreshing

That’s rather candid and refreshing, but it means that the participants have to be so self-assured that they believe they’re lovable as their real selves, no enhancing editing involved.

Would we go out on dates under such rigorously honest circumstances? Only if the place of assignation is—practically pitch-black!

—Perhaps the show is for brutally honest exhibitionists and masochists, mostly?

If “Dating Naked” has its plus points, viewers are more universally turned off by another new reality game or quiz show, “Labor Games,” which goes to the delivery rooms of hospitals and has for its preferred contestants women who are just about to give birth, as well as their complicit love partners!

That’s right, even as the already dilated and very pregnant women are in the throes of labor, they and their partners are asked a series of questions that they force themselves to answer, just so they can win some prizes!

—Talk about the degree of difficulty factor bringing out the best in contestants, this is it!

The wonder is that the TV tilt would be able to find players at all. And yet, it does, as scores of laboring mothers-to-be are attracted by its prizes—and the lurid mass attention that reality shockers command!

In addition, some players share that the birthing process can be really long, so quirky distractions like this now-trending tilt can at least help them—pass the time!

Sure, fine, but turned off viewers still think it’s a really bad idea, on many counts: It’s an invasion of privacy (even if contestants say that it’s OK to be “invaded”)—and it’s too much visual and aural information, as players grunt, gasp and heave, their limbs all athwart as they try to answer the questions posed to them!