Bigot vs. Bigot

Reality TV loves to stick people with completely opposite views together. Not only that, these people will always be from the absolute extreme fringes of their respective cultures. In other words, they will be people holding the real-life equivalent of Strawman Political views.

For instance, if a liberal and conservative are paired together, the liberal will be a pansexual, peace-loving to the point of Stupid Good, vegan hippie anarchist with a penchant for wild conspiracy theories, and the conservative will be a rich, homophobic, Fundamentalist Christian with a thick country accent who thinks the U.S. should blow up Iran. This ensures (hopefully) there will be lots and lots of fighting, but also that there is no one on the show a more balanced person could relate to.

This fighting will be completely pointless, of course, since both sides will be far too narrow-minded to even consider the other side's arguments. Both sides will also be too stubborn to see this, or the fact that they're Not So Different. Their issues with each other may be inexplicably resolved when the show ends with the Apology Scene. (Interesting how they only decide to apologize when the show's about to end, though Manipulative Editing might have a hand in that)

If this is done in order to make a case for some in-between position, it's the Golden Mean Fallacy.

See also Rule of Drama.

Reality Television

 * Wife Swap is the king (or, rather, queen) of this trope. Their specialty is swapping the wives of families with diametrically opposite lifestyles, politics, and attitudes, for example swapping a neat-freak, controlling, urban, high-income yuppie with a messy, laid-back, low-income, rural redneck.
 * Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy (a Wife Swap copy) does the same thing,
 * A season of The Real World managed to make a gay racist and a black homophobe roommates.
 * A curious case happened on Gran Hermano, the spanish version of Big Brother. They brought a white transsexual and a black Muslim as Token Minorities without knowing (or so they say) that the Transsexualism was racist and the Muslim was transphobic.
 * Frequently seen in The Dr. Phil House, providing further evidence that Dr. Phil has morphed from a Talk Show into a Reality Show in all but name.
 * Big Brother, no matter which version you're watching. One season they carried it to new heights when Big Brother US cast couples who had broken up (acrimoniously, of course).
 * Survivor uses this somewhat sparingly, tending instead to go for ego vs. ego, but every season will have at least two bigots of some nature. They may or may not end up on the same team.
 * At least once, Jerry Springer had an episode where the Ku Klux Klan and a group of Black Nationalists went at it for an hour.
 * A very mild version of this happens in the TLC show Four Weddings. In the show, four brides rate each others' weddings and the person who had the highest average rating gets a free honeymoon vacation. They will often have a conservative traditional bride with a normal wedding in a Christian church and a reception in a hotel with a steak dinner and at least one person who has a blended culture wedding in a warehouse and a crazy reception with Asian fusion food and people grinding on each other. Chances are the conservative bride will give the unique bride a low score and complain about how inappropriate it was and the unique bride will complain about how boring the conservative bride's party was.

Scripted Television

 * Has appeared in scripted TV as well. Who can forget when bigoted white guy Archie Bunker got a new neighbor in the form of George Jefferson—a bigoted black guy who couldn't stand Whitey?
 * And as such, had the same repulsed reaction upon meeting the interracial couple (white man, black woman) who were the parents of Jenny, George's soon-to-be daughter-in-law, leading them to commiserate "What's the world coming to?"
 * In a similar vein was the meeting of the very segregationist Lester Maddox and the very Black Power Jim Brown on a 1970 episode of The Dick Cavett Show. Throw Camp Gay Truman Capote into the mix and you have a hell of a night of television.
 * American Dad has Hayley and Stan. Sometimes resolutions will come when it's time to toss out a moral (or Broken Moral, whichever is closer to plot).
 * The Daily Show, once upon a time, had Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell as correspondents. They did a segment called "Even Stevphen" that had them basically take polar opposite views on everything.
 * "Yes!" "No!" "Yeeeeeeessss!"
 * Bizarre had a bigoted family of racial/sexual/national stereotypes making bigoted racial/sexual/national jokes at each others' expense.

Parodies
"Adam Sandler: Shut up, you whale-eating moron!"
 * Brilliantly spoofed on Saturday Night Live in a memorable parody sketch, where they depicted The Real World cast as including an Oklahoman who hated the Irish, an Irishman who hated black Londoners, a Black Londoner who hated American black women, a black American woman who hated Italians, an Italian who hated white trash, a white trash girl who hates Eskimos, an Eskimo who hated lesbians, and a lesbian.


 * SNL also did this with their sketch "The Blame Game" which pitted a white racist and a black racist against each other in a game show.
 * To top it off, when the game show girl demanded that the host not patronize her by calling her "honey", he, along with the other two men snarked, "What a bitch", "What's her problem?", "She's either not getting any, or it's PMS", proving them all to be sexist as well.
 * Angus in Questionable Content mentions he works as a strawman (he's paid by the opposition to go act like a ridiculous caricature of a group, convincing voters to look elsewhere) and that he at one point got into a very heated argument at a rally before figuring out the other guy was a hired strawman as well.
 * Spinnerette has Nazi Sorceror Kugelbitz getting into a fight with Roberta Lee, white supremacist descendant of General Lee (who, despite her beliefs is a practitioner of Hollywood Voodoo).