I have a confession to make. I have fallen completely in love with a reality TV show. This might not seem like a big deal to the 91 trillion of you who watch Survivor or insert-random-VH1-show-here on a regular basis, but it is to me.
I'm the same guy who insisted for the better part of a decade that Murder in Small Town X (look it up, you'll thank me) was the only good reality show ever. Alas, my TV-watching fiends and friends, of late I cannot stop watching MTV's Teen Mom.
The appeal of Teen Mom is simple enough, I suppose. There is a sort of vicarious thrill watching people the same age as you try to take care of a human life rather than worry about midterms or whether those vomit stains from Thursday night will wash out.
But as I continued to watch, I realized that Teen Mom can be boiled down to just one aspect ... and that aspect's name is Gary.
Gary is a true American hero.
Never has there been someone or something so defiantly useless as Gary on television. To the unenlightened, Gary is the roughly 8,000-pound fellow who knocked up poor aspiring hairdresser Amber. The most fascinating quality of the creature they call Gary is that he has absolutely no pretense of being able to do anything remotely helpful in the supporting and rearing of a human child.
Gary has no job. Gary has no skills. Gary has no charm. The only thing Gary might actually have is an orbit. Gary is so actively worthless that Amber inevitably must support him along with their bastard child. Amber allows Gary to live in her apartment rent-free. When it becomes clear that Gary can't even watch their child effectively, Amber is forced to send him out to do errands. It is during one of these errands that - I'm not making this up - Gary meets and falls in love with another teen mom in the diaper aisle of Walmart.
Of course, when Gary finally realizes that it's not a good idea to piss off his girlfriend/landlord/surrogate mother, he tells Amber he wants back in a relationship ... and Amber takes him back. In my 20-plus years of watching television, this is the most impressive thing I have ever seen.
If there is a Gary on every other reality show, I shudder to think of what I've been missing all of these years.
- Alec Bojalad is a junior studying journalism. Send him an e-mail at ab239807@ohiou.edu
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Alec Bojalad
