In the past few weeks there has been a great deal of head-shaking. We shook our heads when Jon and Kate Gosselin announced their upcoming divorce on Monday’s episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8. Some of us shook our heads at the thought of another statistic being made before our eyes, some at the thought of eight kids being shuffled back and forth between two parents, some because we thought the split was inevitable after watching Jon and Kate bicker before our eyes for the past four seasons, and some at the horror that this was all playing out on national television.
We were already shaking our heads before the Jon and Kate bombshell, as Sarah Palin and David Letterman also duked it out in public. When Letterman made a sexual joke on his late-night show about Palin’s underage daughter, Palin attacked him for his joke, saying that “laughter incited by sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is…disgusting.” Letterman later both apologized and admitted he had confused the younger Palin girl with Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin’s 18-year-old daughter who recently gave birth. Some shook their heads at Letterman’s crass joke, while others shook heads for Palin’s attack on a comic.
Though you may think it impossible, Jon, Kate, the eight, Sarah Palin, and David Letterman have one more thing in common despite being the instigators of head-shaking world wide. The Jon and Kate divorce announcement and the Letterman/Palin battle both caused a sky-high jump in ratings for both shows. Letterman had usually trailed Leno by over a million viewers, though he jumped ahead of the Tonight show when Conan O’Brien took over. However, the show following his debate with Palin brought Letterman his highest ratings over O’Brien as of yet.
As for Jon and Kate, the numbers are a bit frightening. Though ratings for the show had been regularly slipping this season, the divorce-announcement episode brought in record-high ratings. Apparently watching a happy family bake cakes and build tree houses is boring, but watching a family of ten implode before our very eyes is fascinating. Teasers for the episode made it clear that something was about to happen, and that something was going to be bad. Commercial previews showed slow-motion clips of Jon and Kate glancing sadly at one another at various family events and showed a teary Kate mentioning ominous tidbits. Theories were that the couple was divorcing, separating, or canceling the show. Either way, 10.6 million people tuned in excitedly to hear the bad news.
The question remains: what is wrong with us? Why do we get so much enjoyment out of other people’s pain and mistakes? Someone makes an offensive joke and it is rewarded with higher ratings. We get wind that a couple with eight young children is bitterly divorcing and we break out the popcorn? What is it about other people’s failures and suffering that has us so intrigued? Maybe after the reality-TV craze started we began to realize that we truly do crave drama, and that everyday life is boring. Maybe we are just looking for other’s mistakes in order to make our own mistakes feel acceptable. Maybe TV is really like a car accident on the side of the road. We don’t want to look, but we feel compelled to. Whatever the reason, one fact remains true: America loves public failure.
This theory may not hold true for all celebrities and their TV shows, though. When Miley Cyrus posed for controversial photos in a 2008 Vanity Fair photo shoot, her Disney Channel television sensation Hannah Montana experienced a huge slide in ratings, as parents pulled their children away from the usually squeaky-clean show. Apparently we know that we shouldn’t encourage bad behavior and watch train wrecks unfold before our eyes, and we are happy to tell our children as much, but when it comes to turning our own eyes, we find it a little more difficult.
This is certainly a case of “do as I say, not as I do.”
