When he was newly divorced from his first wife, my brother moved into a small apartment near the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. Emotionally shattered, he didn’t even bother to hook up the gas and limited his cooking to the jurisdictional domain of the electric kettle and microwave oven. It was in that grungy apartment that my brother began to develop the cooking style that, over the years, became known in our family as “junk-food gourmet.” When I went to see him, he would line up all of the kitchen’s edible items on the counter and from that potpourri, which consisted mainly of instant noodles, frozen dinners, and cartons of packaged milk, he would put together a meal for us. One that I remember most fondly was an instant spaghetti-and-mushroom dinner to which he added hot milk instead boiling water and even took the trouble to beef it up with grated Parmesan he’d found somewhere in the recesses of the fridge. Those meals weren’t the best I’ve ever eaten, but they gave us great satisfaction, because we realized that, considering the revolting processed foods we’d started out with, we had reached the pinnacle of culinary achievement, the Everest of junk food, and planted our flag. Those were not just ordinary meals but a triumph of the human spirit over monosodium glutamate.
Watching the Israeli reality TV series Connected, I can’t help recalling those sumptuous meals in my brother’s hole-in-the-wall kitchen. On paper, Connected looks like just another reality show for commercial TV, but the nearly megalomaniacal artistic ambitions of its exploding-with-talent creators and participants have produced something different. They have managed to take the shallow mush doled out by standard reality shows, and, while not eliminating the mush, they have placed it in a much more complex, clever, and reflexive concept. Similar to the food in my brother’s kitchen, I can’t claim that it’s the best television I’ve ever tasted, but it is definitely a unique blend of reality TV—in my view, the most insincere and artificial television genre there is—and a genuine, impressive attempt by the creators and participants to offer up some kind of truth, not only about themselves, but about humanity in general.