The Broken Record: Television - like being part of a winning team

One-hundred million?
Well, almost.
Nearly 100 million votes were cast for the finale of this season's American Idol.
Do you know how many people voted in the 2008 Presidential Election? Approx-imately 122.5 million.
I don't know about you, but those numbers seem far too close to one another. If people were to vote for their favourite karaoke singer only once, then, of the nearly 300 million American citizens, one-third of them voted in the American Idol finale.
That's absurd. Especially given the number of votes cast for the leader of the Free World.
This got me thinking, why do we love reality television so much? Better yet, why do we still love reality television so much? Hasn't it run its course?
I thought long and hard about this.
Then, it hit me. Let me explain.
Whenever I go to my parents' home, I get the opportunity to enjoy one of the single greatest television inventions - On Demand Television.
Instead of accomplishing something with my life or spending some quality time with the folks, I decided the smarter choice would be to waste my hours away in front of the tube, demanding what I watch and when.
After re-watching the last seasons of Californication, Flight of the Conchords and Entourage (it was a long day and an even later night), I decided to venture into other great HBO series.
Suddenly, I was hooked on In Treatment.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, In Treatment follows Paul, a psychiatrist played by Gabriel Burns, and his work with patients. The show is set in real-time, thus, each episode is prefaced by which patient Paul will be seeing, and the day of the week and the time of the day. The next half-hour, viewers sit in on Paul's therapy sessions.
As I watched each episode in order, I found myself wanting to skip ahead to the following week's sessions. But that would defeat the purpose.
That's when I realized - we are a generation of voyeurs. No, not the sexual kind of voyeur.
We love to watch, dissect and debate all the things that happen daily on television shows.
The reason we still love reality television is just like why I love In Treatment, or why soap operas still exist and are fervently followed - we love to feel like we are a part of something more interesting than reality. Because, let's be honest, a camera doesn't follow most of us around 24/7, so there's no reality in "reality" television - those shows are almost as scripted as sitcoms.
These programs all take advantage of different aspects of our psyches. American Idol makes us feel like we are a part of making some unknown singer into a star. In Treatment made me feel like a fly-on-the-wall in a psychiatrist's office. Soap operas make us feel like we have a more dramatic life than we actually do.
Think about movies for a second. Some people love to watch horror films because they don't get the opportunity to be terrified on a daily basis; thus, they are extracting emotions that are normally dormant.
So maybe we all have a show we watch that makes us feel like we're experiencing something we otherwise never will. I will never be a psychiatrist, and you will probably never sign a singer who will sell a million albums to a recording deal or find out your best friend's mom is sleeping with her assistant who is actually her ex-husband's wizard son - or whatever the hell happens in those soap operas.
Next time you're talking to someone with terrible taste in television, just think about what you watch - chances are it's just as bad.
Besides, I think In Treatment is a genius show and I just made it tie to American Idol, so I'm going out on a limb to say that all television must be pretty terrible.