It all started with a bunch of scantily clad contestants duking it out Lord of The Flies-style on a desert island.
Ever since Survivor burst onto the scene a decade ago, reality television has permeated popular culture and encroached upon almost every aspect of the human experience.
Audiences have watched people being born, beginning (and ending) relationships, getting married, singing their hearts out for a few fleeting moments of fame, testing the boundaries of human endurance, battling addiction, and undergoing extreme physical transformations – to name just a few.
But now that almost every other avenue for delving into a person’s existence has been exhausted, television producers have finally begun probing into one of the most sensitive and intensely personal parts of life: death.
Two new reality series, one based in the U.S. and the other in Britain, are following people who have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses and are entering the last weeks or months of their lives. The U.S. series, entitled Live Like You’re Dying, comes to us courtesy of CBS and Survivor host, Jeff Probst. The series will profile a different person each week, following them as they tie up loose ends, mend fences with estranged family or friends, and have one last big dream fulfilled.
Meanwhile, over in Britain, former Big Brother star Jade Goody is allowing cameras to capture the last days of her battle with cervical cancer. In a recent episode, the 27-year-old mother of two even married her longtime boyfriend as British pop band Girls Aloud serenaded the happy couple from the sidelines.
There have been scattered reports that Goody will allow her actual death to be filmed, although producers have denied these rumours. There’s no question, however, that it could be in the cards.
To date, the only real deaths ever seen on network television have occurred in documentaries or other programs dealing with euthanasia, and occasionally (very rarely) in news footage.
Some would argue that the people featured in these “reality deathwatch” programs have willingly chosen to partake, and are therefore fair game for producers and audiences alike. After all, they’ve presumably made an informed decision, so what’s the harm?
The harm lies partially in what might be motivating them to participate. The fact that these people are receiving payment (monetary or otherwise) for their cooperation raises some serious ethical questions, says Margaret Somerville, the founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law.
Somerville calls any kind of compensation inappropriate in these cases, because it begs the question, would these subjects be allowing their end-of-life experiences to be recorded and broadcast to the world if they, or their loved ones, received nothing in return?
Goody herself admitted to Britain’s Sun tabloid earlier this month that the money she was offered was a major factor in her decision to die in the public eye.
“But not to buy flash cars or big houses,” she added. “It’s for my sons’ future.”
Beyond concerns surrounding motivation, however, we should be asking ourselves if the emergence of these shows demonstrates a lack of basic respect for the sanctity of life, or the sanctity of death.
This type of entertainment (and let’s establish here and now that that’s exactly what it is) pushes the boundaries of decency, and may even prompt feelings of moral discomfort among viewers, something Somerville calls “the ethical yuck factor.” If something doesn’t feel quite right, it probably isn’t.
“We need to be asking, is this somehow disrespectful of death?” says Somerville. “Does this trivialize death? I think it’s almost like death pornography, in a sense.”
The desire to become privy to the most intimate details of the lives of strangers is now overwhelming in our society, and television executives are fully aware of this when they approve new programs. Perhaps these shows are reality TV’s own ‘last gasp’ – a final attempt to inject new life into a fledgling form of entertainment that is scraping the bottom of the barrel for fresh ideas. After all, finding a new best friend for Paris Hilton can only sustain audience interest for so long.
But by extending media voyeurism into the realm of the dying, television producers have crossed an invisible line, and the fact that these programs have passed the ethical standards set by television networks is, frankly, quite disturbing.
Will the next step be to train our lenses on terminally-ill children? Who knows, but we’ve already started down that road.
So will Jade Goody make peace with herself and pass serenely into the light? Or will she be eternally tormented by unfinished business?
I, for one, will not be watching to find out.