Peeking Through the TV Keyhole.

• Author: SALTZMAN, JOE
• Position: Brief Article

THE PASSION for watching our neighbors is probably as old as cave dwellers peering around trees. As humans, we are curious beings, and we probably have spent much of our existence watching and gossiping about our neighbors. Passersby may be repelled at what they see, but they still can't resist looking at an accident or fire. We all know that it's a lot more fun to watch someone else slip on a banana peel than to be the one falling down. Or, to put it in 21st-century terms, it's a lot easier to watch 16 castaways stranded on a desert island, a frazzled want-to-be-a-millionaire struggle with an easy question, seven people locked up in a house, an English family spending three months in a middle-class household circa 1900, or a multimillionaire choosing a bride from a bevy of unknown women.

Always-amazed media commentators insist on doing cover stories and tsk-tsk news reports whenever the public once again becomes a crowd watching lions devouring humans. They mislabel it as "voyeur TV." It's the same old stuff repackaged into this year's reality television.

Those same self-serving media commentators have been appalled for years at such programs as "The Jerry Springer Show" that daily parade average citizens shouting at each other over infidelity or family secrets revealed while the audience impatiently waits for someone to throw a punch at an offending neighbor. Car chases and live-action news events always mean high ratings. Slap "based on a true story" on any made-for-television movie, and the ratings go up a couple of points. Audiences have always loved watching humans in distress--"Alan Funt's Candid Camera" made fools out of thousands of willing subjects and became one of TV's longest-running shows. In 1973, Americans watched the Loud family of California parade their innermost secrets before public television cameras--we even got to see a son coming out of the closet and a marriage breaking apart.

People like to watch other people. Technology has simply made it easier to do so. Now, we can sit by our computers and watch webcams showing us a female named Aimee rolling around on the floor with her dogs, a New York cabdriver talking over live pictures from the streets of New York, or even meat rotting on camera.

This year, American television has discovered what Asian and European television discovered years ago: People will watch other people doing strange things. Real-life drama has an edge that makes TV exciting: Who will be kicked off...