The pro-social reality TV show we need. By Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias

Apr 05, 2024. 

The pro-social reality TV show we need

Matthew Yglesias

12 - 15 minutes

I’ve really been enjoying the chance to go a bit deeper on reader questions in this new Friday format, so thank you all for bearing with us as we try something new and for submitting such thoughtful requests. We know some of you do still miss the old mailbag, though, and wanted to let you know that we’ll be bringing it back once a month. Be on the lookout for a special edition mailbox soon!

In good news this week, I’ve been a little skeptical of Michelle Wu’s approach to things in Boston, but her Squares + Streets zoning reform seems legitimately good. Also, the Lead Detect Prize competition has its first round of winners out, and progress is happening on geoengineering research.

This week, I had some thoughts on one of the pieces we’re recommending, Jessica Winter’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.” They didn’t quite warrant a column of their own, so I thought I’d share them here.

If you’re not familiar with Haidt, he’s an academic with moderate political views. That’s not particularly unusual, but the structure of academia is such that people with moderate views are on the far-right end of the political spectrum in most rooms. People who find themselves in that situation often choose to put their heads down and do their work, but some like to mix it up and spend a non-trivial amount of time punching left. Haidt takes the second approach, and his previous book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” is in particular a critique of the campus left. As you might expect, a lot of left-wing intellectuals don’t like Haidt. And thus, a perhaps surprisingly large amount of Winter’s essay is dedicated to distancing herself from prior Haidt books and kind of talking herself into the idea that it’s okay for her to agree with him about the need for greater regulatory scrutiny of smartphones and social media.

If you’re eyeball-deep in the discourse, this all makes sense.

But stepping back, there’s something kind of funny about it. The basic structure of the smartphone debate is that Haidt is drawing strong pro-regulation policy conclusions from a base of evidence that is suggestive but not entirely definitive. People on the other side are taking the pro-business view that Apple and Google and Facebook and Twitter and ByteDance should be able to do what they want, unless their critics can meet a nearly insurmountable evidentiary burden. Which is just to say that it’s a very traditional left-right argument about business regulation — similar to arguments about smoking or carbon dioxide or seatbelts (where the left was correct) or nuclear energy (where the left was wrong) — but with the traditional positions mixed up.

I don’t know Haidt well, but I have talked to him, and my strong suspicion is that one reason he’s reached the conclusion he has about smartphones is precisely because he is not as right-wing as his critics think — “we’ve got to stop the biggest corporations in the world from running amok” is a very normal progressive idea.

Other recommendations:

    “An Abundance Agenda for New York,” by Sebastian Hallum Clarke.

    Matt Zeitlin on Biden’s aluminum agenda.

    I really enjoyed this video exploring aspect ratio choices made by filmmakers over time and some of the dilemmas of the current era of focus on IMAX and other premium screens. On a related note, I think people sometimes misconstrue the value of the “theatrical experience.” Yes, a big screen and booming sound can be great. But there’s also something to be said for laughing at a comedy in a crowded room, or just being forced to turn your damn phone off and pay attention to story details.

    Mark Goldberg’s take on the World Central Kitchen tragedy in Gaza and the larger context in play.

    I’m going to try harder to stick to my resolution to not make Slow Boring just be about the 2024 race. But if you want to hear my thoughts on election news, check out the Politix podcast — latest episode is about Democrats’ abortion opportunity.

This from Alan, seemed like the perfect lead-in to today’s reader column:

This is a half-baked idea but I genuinely think that a lot of the opposition to certain things is downstream from the fact that they are always portrayed as negative in popular culture, TV shows, movies, etc.

Some wrong ideas you see everywhere:

    The developer is always the bad guy, the ragtag group fighting the developer to preserve the status quo is always the good plucky underdog

    It’s worse for the environment when people live in cities. Living in the sparse pastoral countryside is what's good for nature and the environment

    The bad guys are always the utilitarians. The good guys are always the unbending rule-followers.

It drove me crazy that Season 2 of “The Lincoln Lawyer” seemed to uncritically endorse the idea that actives of a real estate developer — rather than exclusionary zoning in other, higher-priced neighborhoods — were responsible for gentrification of a working class neighborhood. Pop culture is so bad on these topics that it made me really happy that the evil developer character in “Equalizer 3” had a genuinely evil plan that involved using violence and coercion to steal people’s property and redevelop it. That’s bad! If that’s what real estate development was like, then developers would be great villains.

Which brings us to our poll winner this week, Eric C, who asked: You’re the Head of ESG at MTV. After the success of “16 & Pregnant” in reducing teenage pregnancies, you’ve been greenlit for another show, preferably reality-based, that will have positive societal benefits. What’s the pitch for the show, and how will it help?

Just for context here, in the dim dark past, people watched linear television. At first, they watched television broadcasts that were sent out via radio waves. Then came cable television transmitted through coaxial wires and, later, fiber optic cables. The rise of cable led to the rise of a variety of specialty television channels. These eventually became numerous, but some of the real icons of turn of the millennium culture were early cable channels that had pretty generic themes.

ESPN was for sports, HBO was for movies, CNN for was news, and MTV was for music — it stood for “music television.” That meant primarily music videos, then music-themed programming. But because listening to new music is a very young-skewing activity, MTV developed a general youth and youth culture focus. It now feels like an iron law of linear cable that all networks move in the direction of reality programming, and MTV was in fact a huge pioneer here with their show “The Real World.” A later MTV reality show, airing starting in 2009, was called “16 and Pregnant,” and it focused on the lives of pregnant high school students, following them through childbirth and into the early months of their lives as parents.

A fascinating piece of research by Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine found that this show likely induced large changes in the behavior of American teenagers:

    This paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed MTV show 16 and Pregnant on teen childbearing. The reality TV show follows the lives of pregnant teenagers during the final months of their pregnancy and early months of motherhood. We match Vital Statistics birth data to Nielson television ratings data to investigate whether exposure to the show had an impact on teen childbearing rates. We implement an instrumental variables (IV) strategy using local area MTV ratings data from a pre-period to predict local area 16 and Pregnant ratings. We also introduce event study methods, utilizing the specific timing of the show’s introduction to identify a causal effect. The results of this analysis imply that the introduction of this MTV show led to a 4.3 percent reduction in teen births in the 18 months following its initial airing. This accounts for 24 percent of the overall decline in teen births in the United States during that period. We supplement these findings with an examination of data from Google Trends and Twitter, which suggest that this show led to increased interest in contraceptive use and abortion, as captured by internet search and tweeting behavior.

This is cool both because the rapid decline in teen births is an interesting phenomenon to explore, but also because it’s an opportunity to quantify something that I think most people get on an intuitive level but doesn’t get discussed that much — entertainment content is a powerful vector for spreading ideas and social values.

That’s not really a controversial claim. But I do think it’s a somewhat neglected fact. Public opinion is an important driver of political outcomes, but in most cases, noisy, overt, explicitly political activist campaigns are probably not the best ways to drive public opinion. You can’t really talk about the explosion in support for gay rights and marriage equality without talking about “Ellen,” “Will & Grace,” “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” and other pop culture products with minimal policy content but a clear, humanizing message.

Amanda Hess wrote an interesting piece recently about how almost every television portrayal of a woman president seems implicitly based on Hillary Clinton, which reminded me that I always felt the David Palmer character on “24” kind of paved the way for Barack Obama.

Mass culture is slipping away from us these days, and it’s probably hard for shows to have the kind of influence they once did. Still, it’s an interesting idea.

To the point of Alan’s comment, the reality television series I’d really like to see is a portrayal of people who do urban infill real estate development.

I used to enjoy watching “Flip or Flop,” which is kind of a fun show but which also encourages the mentality that there isn’t really anything useful happening in the world of real estate. There is nothing wrong with flipping, per se, but the flipper is in most cases the agent of downstream consequences of a dysfunctional housing situation — they’re looking to buy crappy houses that are nonetheless expensive because of the underlying land, and then do a renovation that’s cheaper than it looks. Why not build a duplex, the ultimate cheap construction modality? Well, that’s illegal.

So I want a show about people who are genuinely adding housing units to the market.

I want to show them talking about what does and doesn’t pencil out and why. I want to see them fighting to get their zoning variances, then needing to deal with four years of litigation even after the project is approved by the Zoning Commission. I want to see the public hearings about proposals for new housing and navigate the nightmare of special historic review boards.

You don’t need to make the developers out to be saints or anything other that what they are: profit-seeking men and women of business. But I think most Americans basically like and respect businesspeople and think it is completely reasonable to try to make money through fair dealings. The “point” of the show would be that these greedy developers are really just trying to identify places where a lot of people would like to live and then make that possible — only to have tons of random obstacles thrown in their way.

I used Claude 3 to generate this pitch:

    “The Builders” is a new reality series that takes you behind the scenes of the exciting world of infill real estate development. Each episode follows a team of passionate developers as they breathe new life into underutilized urban spaces, transforming them into vibrant residential and commercial properties.

    From scouting and acquiring the perfect location to navigating complex zoning regulations and working with local communities, viewers will get an intimate look at the challenges and triumphs these builders face. With a keen eye for design and a commitment to sustainable practices, these visionary developers create projects that not only provide much-needed housing and businesses but also revitalize entire neighborhoods.

    Witness the creativity and problem-solving skills required as our builders navigate unexpected obstacles, manage tight budgets and timelines, and collaborate with architects, contractors, and city officials to bring their ambitious visions to life.

    But “The Builders” is about more than just construction; it’s a celebration of the people who are shaping the future of our cities. Through their hard work and dedication, these developers are making a positive impact, one project at a time.

    Join us on an inspiring journey as we follow the triumphs and challenges of these real-life urban pioneers, and see how their passion for building is transforming communities and changing lives. 

It seems like a pretty good idea!