John Kiesewetter

About the author: John Kiesewetter is a TV and radio critic for the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Most reality TV shows emphasize competition and divisiveness and make a mockery of teamwork and cooperation. However, a reality show reenacting the 1770 voyage of Captain James Cook from Australia to Jakarta, Indonesia, using forty volunteer sailors, proves that reality TV can encourage positive virtues such as cooperation, helpfulness, and selflessness. The grueling thirty-five-hundred-mile journey aboard a replica of Cook's eighteenth-century ship required that crew members work effectively with each other at all times—the verbal abuse common in other reality TV series would have made the level of cooperation necessary aboard the ship impossible. Instead of working against one another to win an individual prize, crew members learned to work together to reach the common goal of a...