Cornelius Range V | Reality television gone wrong

She is the highest-paid reality TV star on the planet. She’s also a businesswoman, socialite, television personality, model and actress. She rakes in $35 million from endorsements, appearances and her perfume line. In 2008, she was a guest hostess for WrestleMania XXVII. She wears an engagement ring worth $2 million, but the cost of the ring was essentially covered by the $17.9 million she earned by selling networks and magazines access to a wedding that neither she nor her fiance had to finance. The crazy part? She’s not that talented, and she’s not that interesting.

By now, you should know that the “she” I’m referring to is Kim Kardashian. But the real question is: why do you even know that? Does anyone actually care? Somewhere along the way, reality TV took a turn for the worse and wound up with Kim Kardashian.

If you want to be a lawyer, you go to law school. If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. However, if you want to be a reality TV star and have a show on E!, then you should make it a point to release a sex tape at some point and come from a ridiculously wealthy family.

“I don’t know what type of message it sends to people that she has essentially accrued her social status through a sex tape,” Nursing senior Anastasia Bailey said.

Paris Hilton, who is apparently close friends with Kardashian, is another example of a reality TV mogul whose appeal is suspect. While both have both expressed regret for the way in which they gained notoriety, the fact still remains that the single-best career decision for both of their careers was a sex tape. What are we expected to take away from this point?

“I don’t know if [Kardashian is] an ideal candidate for ‘role model of the decade,’ but at least from what you see on TV today she’s not a bad example. She’s a prude, one-man, business-savvy entrepreneur,” said Wharton senior Brooke Hinton, overlooking Kardashian’s infamous video debut to the public.

Even President Barack Obama has made light of the fact that his daughters are big fans of Keeping up with the Kardashians. However, he isn’t quite granting the show his stamp of approval.

“Barack really thinks some of the Kardashians — when [Sasha and Malia] watch that stuff — he doesn’t like that as much,” First Lady Michelle Obama said at a roundtable interview recently when asked about what her children watch on TV.

Although many may disagree on the president’s policies on the economy, his judgment in this case is impeccable. The show — and Kardashian — lacks substance.

“I don’t get why we enjoy watching other people’s lives,” Bailey put it well. “It’s kind of stupid.”

Now, of course, I understand that most people wouldn’t consider Snooki or Mike “The Situation” from Jersey Shore to be role models, but at least they have personality. If nothing else, we should demand that the reality television programs we watch feature figures that are either easy to relate to or so outlandish that they make it ironically apparent that reality TV isn’t so real after all.

Think Flavor Flav’s Flavor of Love, in which the former rapper courted more than a dozen women in a Bachelor-esque fashion all in the pursuit of reality TV love. Or The Biggest Loser, in which overweight contestants compete among themselves to see who can lose the most weight, all while navigating food-temptation challenges designed to get the contestants to regress. These are the stories that deserve to be followed if we must partake in the circus that is reality TV.

Cornelius Range is a College senior from Memphis, Tenn. His email address is crang@sas.upenn.edu. Plead the Fifth appears every Wednesday.

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