First appeared in Sheckley's collection, Is That What People Do?, reprinted by Brian Attebery, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, Robert Weinberg.
Summary:
Sometime in the near future, people will have TV cameras show up in your living room. You have to be natural or they'll cut away. Better to have bad ratings than none at all. Nobody wants people acting differently than they normally would.
Discussion (Spoilers):
The couple know they are boring, so they spice up their lives in case the cameras come calling again.
Sheckley had already predicted reality TV before most writers, but here the speculation is that we are actually boring, which is sort of interesting. The shows people watch are more interesting than most people's lives.
However, to become interesting, people would have to fake their lives, which is what we get from most reality TV--people behaving unnaturally to create drama that might get people watching your reality show.
For so short a story, the tale accomplishes much.
I am going through the Norton anthology, story by story, to get a sense for the modus operandi. They seem to be seeking shorter works, provocative works, and possibly works that present gender in a certain manner. There is no particular gender issue at play except maybe the wife chooses not to stir up marital strife for the sake of ratings.
But Sheckley has had better stories than this, so it's odd that this one is selected. Maybe this is the academic aspect, allowing professors to select this among other TV tropes.
The other possibility is that stories were selected to make them easier for non-SF readers; however, you'd think that a course in SF would be more interested in making a splash as opposed to easing people into the waters (especially by 1960-90). When this was published in 1993, most readers would have already been exposed to far stranger SF on TV and movies.
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