Everything Bad Is Good for You

out how the participants should best navigate the environment that’s been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other human beings humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other human beings in a complex, high-stakes environment where no established strategies exist, and watching them find their bearings. That’s why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night’s episode: Why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?

Some of that challenge comes from an ever-changing system of rules, but it also comes from the rich social geography that all reality programming explores. In this one respect, the reality shows exceed the cognitive demands of the video games, because the games invariably whittle away at the branches of social contact. In the gameworld, you’re dealing with real people through the mediating channels of 3D graphics and text chat; reality shows drop flesh-and-blood people into the same shared space for months at a time, often limiting their contact with the outside world. Reality program participants are forced to engage face-to-face with their comrades, and that engagement invariably taps their social intelligence in ways that video games can only dream of. And that social chess becomes part of the audience’s experience as well. This, of course, was the appeal of that pioneering reality show, MTV’s The Real World, which didn’t need contests and fabulous prizes to lure its viewers; it just needed a group of people thrust together in a new space and forced to interact with one another.

The role of audience participation is one of those properties that often ends up neglected when the critics assess these shows. If you take reality programming to be one long extended exercise in public humiliation, then the internal monologue of most viewers would sound something like this: “Look at this poor fool—what a jackass!” Instead, I suspect those inner monologues are more likely to project the viewer into the show’s world; they’re participatory, if only hypothetically so: “If I were choosing who to kick off the island, I’d have to go with Richard.” You assess the social geography and the current state of the rules, and you imagine how you would have played it, had you made it through the casting call. The pleasure and attraction of that kind of involvement differ from the narrative pleasure of the sitcom: the appeal of Happy Days doesn’t come from imagining how you might have improved on the pep talk that Fonzie gives Richie over lunch at Al’s. But in the world of reality programming, that projection is a defining part of the audience’s engagement with the show.

Old-style game show viewers also like to imagine themselves as participants; people have been shouting out the answers in their living rooms since the days of 21. (Reality programming embraces and extends the logic of game shows, just as shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under expand on the template originally created by the soap opera.) But the rules and the “right answers” have increased in complexity since Herbert Stempel took his famous dive. “Playing” a reality show requires you to both adapt to an ever-changing rulebook, and scheme your way through a minefield of personal relationships. To succeed in a show like The Apprentice or Survivor, you need social intelligence, not just a mastery of trivia. When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us—the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression—scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly, and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the characters, but those connections don’t have the same participatory effect, because traditional narratives aren’t explicitly about strategy. The phrase “Monday-morning quarterbacking” was

THE INTERACTIVE NATURE of games means that they will inevitably require more decision-making than passive forms like television or film. But popular television shows—and to a slightly lesser extent, popular films—have also increased the cognitive work they demand from their audience, exercising the mind in ways that would have been unheard of thirty years ago. For someone loosely following the debate over the medium’s cultural impact, the idea that television is actually improving our minds will sound like apostasy. You can’t surf the Web or flip through a newsstand for more than a few minutes without encountering someone complaining about the surge in sex and violence on TV: from Tony Soprano to Janet Jackson. There’s no questioning that the trend is real enough, though it is as old as television itself. In Newton Minow’s famous “vast wasteland” speech from 1961, he described the content of current television programming as a “procession of…blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder”—this in the era of Andy Griffith, Perry Como, and Uncle Miltie. But evaluating the social merits of any medium and its programming can’t be limited purely to questions of subject matter. There was nothing particularly redeeming in the subject matter of my dice baseball games, but they nonetheless taught me how to think in powerful new ways. So if we’re going to start tracking swear words and wardrobe malfunctions, we ought to at least include another line in the graph: one that charts the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers. That line, too, is trending upward at a dramatic rate.

Television may be more passive than video games, but there are degrees of passivity. Some narratives force you to do work to make sense of them, while others just let you settle into the couch and zone out. Part of that cognitive work comes from following multiple threads, keeping often densely interwoven plotlines distinct in your head as you watch. But another part involves the viewer’s “filling in”: making sense of information that has been either deliberately withheld or deliberately left obscure. Narratives that require that their viewers fill in crucial elements take that complexity to a more demanding level. To follow the narrative, you aren’t just asked to remember. You’re asked to analyze. This is the difference between intelligent shows, and shows that force you to be intelligent. With many television classics that we associate with “quality” entertainment—Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, Frasier—the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters onscreen. They say witty things to each other, and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom clichés, and we smile along in our living room, enjoying the company of these smart people. But assuming we’re bright enough to understand the sentences they’re saying—few of which are rocket science, mind you, or any kind of science, for that matter—there’s no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. There’s no filling in, because the intellectual achievement exists entirely on the other side of the screen. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge your body watching Monday Night Football. The intellectual work is happening onscreen, not off.

The forces at work in these systems operate on multiple levels: underlying changes in technology that enable new kinds of entertainment; new forms of online communications that cultivate audience commentary about works of pop culture; changes in the economics of the culture industry that encourage repeat viewing; and deep-seated appetites in the human brain that seek out reward and intellectual challenge. To understand those forces we’ll need to draw upon disciplines that don’t usually interact with one another: economics, narrative theory, social network analysis, neuroscience.

This is a story of trends, not absolutes. I do not believe that most of today’s pop culture is made up of masterpieces that will someday be taught alongside Joyce and Chaucer in college survey courses. The television shows and video games and movies that we’ll look at in the coming pages are not, for the most part, Great Works of Art. But they are more complex and nuanced than the shows and games that preceded them. While the Sleeper Curve maps average changes across the pop cultural landscape—and not just the complexity of single works—I have focused on a handful of representative examples in the interest of clarity. (The endnotes offer a broader survey.)

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.