Jerry "The King" Lawler

During the September 27, 2007 episode of WWE’s Smackdown, the show’s general manger Teddy Long suffered a heart attack during his planned in-ring wedding. This was part of a storyline. Five years later, on the September 10, 2012 edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw, ringside and television commentator Jerry Lawler collapsed off-camera and would later be reported as having suffered a heart attack. This, unfortunately, was not a storyline. While both of these events ‘happened,’ only the latter was real – as real as anything could possibly get.

The real heart attack that took place on September 10 of this year left the WWE in a position no other television broadcaster ever has to face. This media production had to not only tell its audience on live broadcast television that a man just had a heart attack, but also convince their audience that a man actually had a heart attack. Before we get into what this all means, let’s take a look at what happened that night.

Jerry Lawler had been at the announce table with fellow commentator Michael Cole as he is almost every episode. These two men ‘call the action’ in the ring, narrating the events to give context and background information to the viewer. During a match, Lawler collapsed at ringside (off-camera) and the announcers went silent. All the home audience could hear was the ambient noise from the arena. After several minutes, Cole began calling the match on his own with no acknowledgement for Lawler’s absence. It was not until two segments later that Cole addressed the audience about the incident:

Professional wrestling has always had a unique relationship with reality, as the fictionalized nature of the performance is tacitly understood by the audience, leading to the assumption that whatever is seen is planned or ‘part of the act.’ How, then, is the audience supposed to react to this news, given the WWE’s constant reification of the idea that everything one sees is a story? The live broadcast gives them little time and resources to not only acknowledge the event, but to clarify its legitimacy. So they state (via Cole): “This is not part of tonight’s entertainment. This has happened… This is a real life situation.” This mantra was restated throughout the remaining 3-hour broadcast, with new details on the situation given each time.

Here one can begin to see the type of situation WWE found itself in. This is a company that operates on the assumption that whatever is seen on their broadcasts is part of a larger performance, a fictitious storyline. However, this unique convention has led to problems in the past. Take, for instance, when real life chairman of WWE Vince McMahon appeared as his ‘character’ Vince McMahon (think Stephen Colbert and ‘Stephen Colbert’) on a Raw broadcast and ‘died’ in a fiery limousine explosion.

While this was meant to be a ‘kayfabe’ event (meaning existing within the fiction of the program), there were possible real life consequences. As a publically traded company, WWE answers not only to their paying customers and fans, but to their stockholders as well. During the ‘McMahon death’ angle, CNBC reporter Darren Rovell questioned if purporting the head of your company has ‘died’ on your company’s official press release and website could be grounds for misleading stockholders. The company’s response:

“It is well known to our shareholders and our viewers that “Mr. McMahon” is a character portrayed by Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the founder and Chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.”

Here we see a fascinating example of the WWE acknowledging the artifice of their promotion, citing ‘character’ and ‘story’ as reasons why such an event should not have real world consequences. Examples like this show that for WWE, the scripted segment is the norm, and reality is the exception to the rule, not the other way around. WWE expects viewers to know the fictive nature of the events on-screen, despite constant attempts to undermine their own artifice. Instead of just showing the limo explode on-screen, the storyline crept into all other forms of their media empire: website, press releases, WWE Magazine, and recap shows. Vince McMahon did not make public appearances for weeks during the angle. This is like if an Emmy-nominated actor whose character was killed off the show couldn’t go to the ceremony because the writers wanted to ‘keep the fiction alive.’

Teddy Long's "Storyline" Heart Attack

Returning to Jerry Lawler’s heart attack, what makes this event so fascinating is how no other television broadcast has to deal with such issues of reality/fiction. Part of this is due to the live nature of the performance, but Saturday Night Live, as an example of another live performance show, would rarely face this problem because they follow certain conventions in terms of content and portrayal. SNL rarely challenges standard expectations and so their audience is trained to easily tell what is a written sketch and what is not. However, WWE’s long history of bucking convention makes this negotiation more difficult, as can be seen with its past use of a heart attack in a storyline mentioned in this article’s opening. When little is off-limits in terms of storytelling fodder and anything can be expected, how can the audience tell when something truly unexpected happens?

Overall, the live fiction program is a rare part of the contemporary television landscape, and this special nature raises particular challenges and negotiations, particularly when it comes to the nature of fiction and reality, the planned and the spontaneous. Professional wrestling not only lives in this tenuous environment, it thrives upon it. However, existing within such a state of tension brings unique challenges with unique solutions.

But (yes—you knew that was coming)…there is simply too much reality TV to keep up with as a TV scholar; and there are too many relevant reality series I should be watching as a scholar that I simply cannot bring myself to view for more than 5 minutes at a time. And that is why Joel McHale of The Soup and Chelsea Handler of Chelsea Lately (both on E!) are saving my life every week.

Both series, for the uninitiated, spend time on their comedy shows recapping and discussing developments in reality series (and the lives of their stars); I can tune in nightly to Chelsea and weekly to Joel and discover what happened that regular viewers such as my students might be gabbing about—and I can see the key moments in brief, less excruciating time frames. After studying how each show presents its take on the genre, from The Soup and Chelsea Lately we can glean what some of the main appealing elements of this genre are for many viewers.

The “Showgirls” factor

Much as with the celebrated film Show Girls, a lot of reality TV is unintentionally funny, and the comic framings of both shows aim to make you laugh at even the most serious moments. It’s a cathartic, desperate humor at work: I want to weep when I see a 2 year old from Toddlers and Tiaras literally fall off a stage because she’s so exhausted after a pageant, but it feels better to see this and hear Joel say “Her prize was a carton of menthol cigarettes and a jug of moonshine.” I want to mail copies of The Feminine Mystique to the producers who green-lit Bridalplasty, but I can breathe a little easier when I hear Chelsea tell me that “the show’s alternate title is ‘Exploiting Desperate Women with Extremely Low Self-Esteem’” or see The Soup do a send-up called Idol Plasty (noting that it’s brought to viewers “by FOX—and E!—cause that’s kind of their thing.”)

The Inbred factor

Both series also glory in the fact that many reality shows tap into inbreeding—both metaphorically and generically. The worst moments (e.g., aforementioned toddler or the Civil War re-enactor from Milwaukee on Idol) point the finger of blame at the stars of the genre—and in fact have no problem lumping the “regular folk” in with the “celebrities” so that Kim Kardashian is painted with the same brush as a pageant mom. Our hosts posit these stars as the worst examples of our culture and society (Chelsea noted that Jersey Shore heading to Italy next season means we can “mark [Italy] off as another country that will now hate us forever”). This is what happens when stupid people get a chance to be on TV, right? I realize this is not at all fair, but I also believe many of us watch these shows to feel better about ourselves (we’re much classier and more well-bred than these folks!), and both series aid and abet us in this rationalization. Both series also blur their takes on the genre with their takes on other elements of our entertainment culture, skewering the coverage of the riots in Egypt (it might shut down Angelina Jolie’s filming of Cleopatra!), Brooke’s wedding on One Tree Hill, the website for cheaters AshleyMadison.com, and all our reality faves in one fell swoop. We might like to think “other” TV is more refined, but there’s bad to be found everywhere.

“The Host Who Watches It All for You” factor

By reducing reality TV series to brief clips and comments, McHale and Handler and their teams announce what many of us know: a lot of reality TV is merely a hodgepodge of shocking, over-the-top moments—whether it’s the bachelor choosing no one to marry or the World War II vet demonstrating that his “memento” bazooka flame thrower still works. Not unlike certain scripted procedurals that shall remain unnamed, we can do many other things while watching a reality series, using them as a way to escape a tiring day at work, at school, or with the kids.

So long live reality TV—the good and the bad of it! It gives these two comics great fodder for their shows, which in turn means I don’t have to actually watch much. And if in the end I can do a superiority dance for a few deluded minutes, I’m all for it.

Trying to watch itself, Egyptian state TV has lost its collective mind. They have slid into a self-comforting psychosis. They don’t reject reality as much as they simply create a whole new one. It’s painful to see the announcers, dressed in their clean suits or dresses, perfectly made up as if it were just another day at the office and yet with a subtle kind of fear in their eyes, scramble about reading the latest pronouncements from the government. As they castigate the demonstrators, treat them, using the very words of the government, like children, as they describe the paralyzing crisis overtaking the country there is one thing they never, ever do: say why this is all taking place.

Although on every other media outlet on the planet the message is loud and clear — “Mubarak Must Go!” — the words have never been mentioned on state television. Never has a protest sign been allowed to freeze on the screen calling for the president to step down. While the world shows the millions of demonstrators throughout Egypt, state TV cameras frame the calming images of the river Nile, flowing from south to north as it has always done. An observer untrained in critical thinking faculties — and there are millions of these in Egypt as the result of a deliberate weakening of the national education system — would think that a group of radical criminals had suddenly descended on the mother land with a solitary purpose: destroy everything. I think of the black-dressed nihilists smashing the Dude’s stuff in The Big Lebowski (1998) as they snicker, “we believe in nothing!”

Egyptian state television is psychotic. Is it possible that because they say a tree is a house plant or a pebble is a mountain that this becomes true? Do they believe their own nonsense? Will they wake up tomorrow or next week and blurt out to themselves, “sorry, sorry, sorry. I lied, I’m shameless. I could have quit”?

Earlier today a group of what can only be described as pro-government thugs posing as counter-demonstrators came riding into Tahrir square on horses and camels to smash the faces and crumple the bodies of pro-change demonstrators. I found myself watching those images and thinking about Lawrence of Arabia. Specifically the scene where the heroes go rolling into Aqaba on their camels to throw off the oppressive Turks with all of their industrial military might. But when some of these thugs were torn off of their horses and camels, they were found to be in possession of police ID badges. Not heroes at all, but dastardly villains. (In fact Omar Sharif, the doe-eyed star of Lawerence, came out in support of the demonstrators, but he’s too old for a camel counter-charge now.)

Do these villains really, really believe the alternate reality of Egyptian state television? Does saying something over and over in the face of material reality make it true either to yourself or to those who are listening to you? As I watch Al Jazeera replay the images of charging camels I begin to doubt all truth. Maybe this is a teaching moment; maybe I can ask both myself and my students to reflect on the ways in which American television might be forcibly birthing its own reality through constant repetition.

I am tempted to think, as I watch Egyptian state television, that I’m watching the end of a regime of representation just as surely as I’m watching the end of a political regime. That in their last dying kicks, isn’t it symptomatic of the end that state broadcasting is repeating the same kinds of lies for which it was famous in the 1973, 1967, 1956, and 1948 wars? Surely these dinosaurs are on their way out and there is no room at all in the modern world for such an utter disregard for reality.

But then I remember the Bush administration and how, despite coming from the most consciously modern nation on the globe, they also made up their own reality.