Nov. 3, 2010 (In These Times) -- Potential Stepmoms were welcomed to the California estate where they'd be living while dating divorcee Don Mueller on NBC's Who Wants To Marry My Dad? "This is our house," said Mueller's son Chris. Except it wasn't.
Neither was the six-car garage or the $165,000 Ferarri Don drove on the show. Despite the entry sign that read "The Muellers" and the family photos on the walls, Don's family lives in a lovely, but hardly-palatial, Cincinnati house. The same bait-and-switch mansions and hot tubs were used on Meet My Folks.
Reality TV producers relocate "the folks" on such shows from their own modest homes to erase anything so banal as a middle- or working-class existence because integrated marketers prefer upscale homes as the sets where their products will be showcased. Reality TV coaches us to lust after the exorbitant lifestyles of trust fund brats on MTV's Paris Hilton's My New BFF, trophy wives on Bravo's Real Housewives franchise and wealthy bachelors on The Millionaire Matchmaker. Watching the bad behavior of heiresses, Housewives, and bad-toupee-wearing moguls plays on Americans' twin desires to hate the rich for having what most of us don't--and to be them.
From Fox's The Simple Life to wedding-industrial complex series such as WeTV's Platinum Weddings, reality TV has skewed our economic realities, overemphasizing the short-term pleasures of "having nice things" while hiding the long-term economic consequences of our nation's overconsumption. "I don't understand saving for the rainy day," celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe said earnestly on The Rachel Zoe Project. Never mind that Americans are drowning in debt--we need couture. "Live like it's your last day, every day!" she urged.
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