By now, of course, even meerkats are familiar with the damage reality TV can do to relationships. Relentless surveillance, especially in mundane domestic environments like The Real World and Big Brother, is so stressful it makes strangers hate each other within hours. So imagine the effect it has on just-marrieds, who have just enough of a history together to be slightly sick of each other even before the cameras start rolling.
And yet still they readily conspire with those who plan to undo them. It's a peculiar, if democratic, paradox: Our wealthiest, most privileged citizens—the freest people in the history of the universe, essentially—elect to be scrutinized in the manner of maximum-security inmates.
In prisons, banks, 7-Elevens and everywhere else closed-circuit cameras now roost, surveillance plays dual roles: It records inappropriate activity and, theoretically, at least, it also deters it. It's this latter function, no doubt, that celebrity couples find attractive. Pampered narcissists may be indifferent to the eyes of security guards, or even the eyes of God, but the eyes of three million hypercritical teenagers? Talk about accountability! Having your own reality show is like going to AA, minus the needy drunks. It's Pilates for your marriage. It will strengthen its core, enhance its agility, improve its stamina.
But just like a Pilates video, every marriage looks ridiculous if you stare at it long enough. The subliterate shorthand of goofy facial expressions. The stupid jokes. The codependent baby-talk. The awful spousal behavior that is tolerated and even nurtured. Thanks to their celebrity heritage, the stars of MTV marriage series start off their shows as idealized as porcelain wedding-cake toppers. By the end of their first season, they're mulch for Jimmy Kimmel's joke-writers.
You don't have to be a member of Focus on the Family to decode the message this sends to the millions of wayward spirits who look to celebrities for guidance. Indeed, if marriage is the bedrock of civilization, then celebrity marriage is the bedrock of the bedrock: As goes Travis Barker, so goes the future of America. And after its short-lived matrimonial jam session with a woman who turned out to be more hoochie than mama, the future of America is majorly unstoked about marriage and just wants to kill it in the clubs with its boy DJ AM for a while.
Do you think it's mere coincidence that the most successful relationships reality TV depicts are the most deviant? Hugh Hefner and his dedicated staff of professional fossil freaks on The Girls Next Door are nearly as harmonious as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. HBO's Cathouse is another homey testimonial to the virtues of virtual polygamy.
Still, it'll take a lot more than a bunch of hookers and old men to make America stop saying "I do." Like the ABC sitcom According to Jim, which, not coincidentally, one imagines, is about a happy married couple, civilization's most important institution may not get great press, but it remains surprisingly popular. In 2004, 2.2 million marriages took place in the U.S. Surely at least one of them involved a pair of stable, well-adjusted celebrity exhibitionists who would love to share their home life with the world, but, unfortunately, the purveyors of reality TV are determined to pretend this is not the case.