31 Final thoughts

Did you know tha t st atistically Sea n“T he D ark Destroyer” Wallace is the Chaser you most wa nttof ace if you get the chance? O r th at when MasterChef contestant Alvin Quah presented the judges with his dish ‘Drunken Chicken’, it became such an internet sensation tha title ad to shortages of Shaoxing wine across Australia?

Ba ckinmye arly-20s I would ha veb alked at the idea tha tI would be so entrenched in the minutiae of free-to-air reality television. Especially after spending my university years developing a love for watching, discussing and being generally insufferable about prestige drama in lieu of developing an actual personality (“Have you guys seen this new show Breaking Bad? It’s changing the way we think about television, don’t worry, you’ve probably never heard of it”).

M yf amily, however, never shared my derision for the endless reality TV conveyor belt. M yp arents are from a generation before Netflix, or Disney+, or even MySky. Back in their da yyous at down with your lamb roast, watched the mother of the nation Judy Bailey tell you wha tw as going on with the Soviets and settled in for whatever the mysterious TVNZ overlords felt like feeding you. As for my sisters, maybe it was the outdated patriarchal idea sth at underpinned the creation of the entire industry, or maybe it was just pure coincidence, but the mid-00s reality staples seemed to play directly into their interests (interior design, hot single morons, body-conscious people becoming more body conscious).

However, none of those concepts managed to elicit anything from me other than dismissal. The idea of sitting in a leaky Dunedin flat a nd w atching a young couple on The Block decide between copper or brass door handles felt redundant. While watching MasterChef or Hell’s Kitchen four nights a week and choking down Sarah’s mystery stir-fry from a can or Jono’s microwaved steak would have reached new levels of self-masochism. So, I shunned the whole genre. Who needs it?

But in the past few years something ha s ch anged. I’ve started to love reality TV. Initially I put this down to me transitioning from being an irony-poisoned 20-something to a sickeningly earnest 30-year-old, with a new love for the French provincial cooking method. But, on reflection, I realised it’s more tha nth at.

One of the small silver linings of the last few hellish yea rs h as been the widespread acceptance of remote working. Not only does this mean ironing fewer shirts, but also it meant more family time back in Timaru. There’s something special about neatly fitting yourself back into your family’s day-to-day, appreciating the little things you ma yh ave forgotten or wouldn’t otherwise see on a whirlwind weekend trip. Those little things I bega n to appreciate? You guessed it. The shows on the family TV every night. They became as routine for me as a post-dinner cup of tea. Stable, dependable sources of secondhand joy.

Wha t st arted a smyp assive acquiescence quickly became a full-on investment. Have you ever seen a grown man brought to tears over a perfectly cooked crab omelette? This year, I’ve seen three simultaneously, my dad, myself and MasterChef Fans vs Favourites contestant/27-year-old firefighter from Darwin, Daniel. Sure, I know these shows are meticulously engineered to tug a tmyhe art strings and push my empathy buttons, but at a certain point I think I just gave in and let it wash over me, deciding to throw all critica lf aculties overboard. There’s comfort to be found in benign consistency. N owIh ave another bridge to home, even if it is artificia l.I can be bored or sad on the other side of the Cook Strait, flick on good old-fashioned free-to-air for an hour then cha ttomyp arents about how no-one in the fina lch ase knew Serbia’s Baikal is the deepest lake in the world, or message my sister about how I didn’t expect Chris Parker to be so ripped or to look so good running along a beach with a shovel.

Despite my gradual softening I’m not a complete sap. I still can’t bring myself to ever care about home renovation or house-flipping, and I’m still using my taste in television as a substitute for a real personality. But as I get older and find myself heading even further away from home for longer periods of time, I take some solace in the idea tha tmyf amily will still be retiring to the couch after going about their days a nd w atching MasterChef enter the home stretch, or another season Dancing with the Stars kick off, and hopefully, wherever I am, I will be too.

Jordan Hamel is a writer, poet and performer. He is the co-editor of No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of Aotearoa climate change poetry from Auckland University Press. His debut poetry collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You is out now.