What Reality TV Is Teaching the World About Miami (Hint: It's Not Good)

Kourtney & Kim Take Miami: Fake as hell.

Miami is not a city that lends itself to summary. This town is too vast in its varying shades of weird beauty and visceral energy, its myriad colors and countries splashed about the streets. From Doral to downtown, from Hialeah to Homestead, from Miami Gardens to Miami Beach, there is simply too much life happening to neatly package and sell in bite-size morsels for the masses.

But if you peruse your TV guide, you'll find that the masses don't really seem to give a shit about all that. They want their Miami morsels, and they're getting their fill as more and more reality TV shows about the 305 project their mind-boggling unrealities to viewers nationwide just about every night.

See also:
- Five Reality TV Shows That Could Save the World
- The Five Weirdest Reality Shows Coming This Season

Reality TV is one of the harbingers of doom for Western civilization. Recently, though, it seems the rash of Miami-based shows purporting to show "everyday reality" in the city has actually brainwashed the rest of the world into thinking Miami is nothing more than a collection of celebutantes, cops, and rednecks.

I recently spent a couple of months wandering through Western Europe. One night, in Paris, I took a cab with a fellow Miami expat. With our driver, a Lebanese man named Omar, we talked about and compared the ways of life in our respective metropoli -- Miami and Paris. The result was a diatribe from Omar about how terribly dangerous and drug-infested a city Miami is, an image he deemed perfectly accurate in spite of never having visited.

How did he come to this less than flattering sense of our town? An education taken from The First 48.

The millions of viewers who live off of the savage emptiness of shows such as Kourtney & Kim Take Miami and South Beach Tow have apparently come to believe these are real glimpses into the 305. Most people living, breathing, working, romancing, and dying in this city have never gone on a shopping spree at Bal Harbour Shops or gotten into a brawl, staged or not, in the streets with a tow-truck driver. Contrary to the visions brought to us by the Bad Girls Club Miami, not all women clap and communicate in monosyllabic words in order to make a point.