Sunday, April 20, 2008

What? TV doesn't portray reality? No way...

I am experiencing a lull in my Netflix queue. Nothing's leaving and nothing new is getting to me. There is only one explanation for this: I currently have at home all 3 discs of the first season of Greek.

The ABC Family series, currently in the second part of its first season, follows the lives of a group of college students in different (fictional) fraternities and sororities at the fictional Cyprus-Rhodes University. Real-life Greek students seem to be split on the issue. At the outset, I was against the idea of a show about Greek life that uses a red keg cup as its logo. But one "maybe I'll just watch one episode to see how bad it is" viewing spurred more. And now I'm hooked.

But this is not a post about how the show misrepresents fraternities and sororities, as I could go on forever about details big and small that they get wrong--and, sometimes, right. The show is true to life in the sense that in any Greek community, there will be people that go to the extreme with the party lifestyle, and there will be people who live in moderation.

However. The show gets something wrong on not only in portraying Greeks, but simply in portraying modern college students.

Cell phones and texting are only minimally shown. Computers are only used in an academic sense. No one uses any form of instant messaging, or even vaguely references the Internet. Social media doesn't even seem to exist. And how realistic is that?!

From what I've seen, college students are always communicating in some form that does not necessarily include face-to-face contact. And sometimes, they are talking face-to-face AND communicating to someone else in another manner. They are connected to each other in dozens of ways, and Greek just doesn't ring true to me in that aspect. And if you ask me, the writers are missing out on some great potential plot twists. Why not have the dean find out about an illegal function via Twitter, or a ZBZ sister get dumped on Facebook? Situations like that happen in real collegiate and Greek life, so why not show it on TV?

Gotta go. The new episode is on.

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