{"id":1961,"date":"2008-06-11T19:26:13","date_gmt":"2008-06-11T19:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1961"},"modified":"2008-06-11T19:26:13","modified_gmt":"2008-06-11T19:26:13","slug":"playing_makebel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1961","title":{"rendered":"Playing Make-Believe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reality television is gimmicky. I get that. It’s entertainment and depicts a distorted, artificial reality that doesn’t exist in the world that you and I inhabit. Still, the gimmickry can be overdone at times. 30 Days<\/i><\/a> is a documentary series that profiles various people in month-long experiments that might have been dreamt up by a slightly daft social studies teacher. Past episodes have featured scenarios like a staunch immigration opponent being sent to live with an undocumented family and a computer programmer whose job was outsourced sent to live with a family in India. Lessons are supposed to be learned and eyes are supposed to be opened. <\/p>\n

Last night’s episode featured an ex-NFL player who agreed to use a wheelchair for thirty days. The cameras followed him around as he struggled to maneuver through his palatial but minimally accessible house, competed with a wheelchair rugby team, and met with people in a rehab hospital who had experienced spinal cord injuries. The whole thing seemed silly to me. A television audience isn’t going to learn much about living with a physical disability by watching a wealthy, able-bodied athlete get around in a wheelchair for a few weeks. In fact, the episode came close to portraying the wheelchair as the sum total of the disability experience. <\/p>\n

I’m probably expecting too much of a television show, but the episode’s tone left me frustrated and depressed. Its superficial voyeurism did little to give viewers any real insight into the lives of people with disabilities. The producers could have chosen a more interesting route and focused on someone with an actual disability who goes to live with, I don’t know, just about any family in America that’s clueless about disability; it’s not like they’re in short supply. Instead, we get this tripe that probably had most viewers think, “Holy crap, glad I’m not a gimp.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reality television is gimmicky. I get that. It’s entertainment and depicts a distorted, artificial reality that doesn’t exist in the world that you and I inhabit. Still, the gimmickry can be overdone at times. 30 Days is a documentary series that profiles various people in month-long experiments that might have been dreamt up by a […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-vD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}