The title promises a screen, but the poem never describes one. All it gives us is a viewer's remark, "entertaining to see how age / and ruin change us", delivered in the offhand tone of someone commenting on tonight's episode. There is no subject and no punctuation, so the sentence drifts in like something half-overheard. The word "entertaining" sets the trap. It puts us in the cool position of a spectator watching other people change. Then the last pronoun springs the trap shut. It is not "them" but "us". The camera has been pointed at the audience all along.
The phrase "age and ruin" does a lot of quiet damage. The line break leaves "age" hanging at the end of the first line, and "ruin" arrives in the next as if it were a natural companion. It isn't, quite. "Age" is a gentle word, a matter of years. "Ruin" belongs to crumbling buildings and fallen empires, and it makes growing old sound like demolition. Against that, "change" is almost comically mild. The gap between the word and what it describes is where the dark humour sits. The sounds help too. "Age", "change" and "rain" share a long *a* that runs from the first stanza into the second, a thread of sound linking the spectator's remark to the weather that follows.
The second stanza drops the commentary and gives only images. "A hard rain" has no verb, and its two heavy syllables, "hard rain", land back to back like a pair of beats. The next line, "meeting with our selves", is odd in two ways. Splitting "selves" into its own word makes the plural audible: we are not one self but several, perhaps the younger one and the worn one meeting face to face. And "meeting" is a bureaucratic, calendar-ish word for something so unsettling. The syntax is also ambiguous. The rain may be what meets our selves, or we may meet our selves in the rain. Either way, the weather is an agent here, not just a backdrop.
Then comes "a sort of tar". The hedge "a sort of" is casual, the voice of someone who can't quite find the word, and that vagueness feels honest, since it is hard to name what time leaves behind. Tar is black and sticky. It seals roofs and roads against water, and it holds things fast. So the picture of rain turning into tar is a strange reversal. Water, which we expect to wash things clean, becomes the substance that clings. Judging by the imagery, the poem suggests that meeting our older selves leaves a residue we can't rinse off. This is an inference, but it fits the sticky, final weight of the image.
The poem's sound is plain, and that suits the flat tone. There is no meter to speak of and no end rhyme, only short lines of two to five syllables or so. The nearest thing to a rhyme is the shared vowel and *r* of "hard" and "tar", which are separated by "sort", which echoes the same sound in a different shade. That faint echo ties the weather to its residue without making the lines sound neat. The poem ends on its shortest word, which works like a lid closing.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does in so little space. In two stanzas it moves from spectator to participant, and from wry amusement to something closer to dread, without ever raising its voice. The title carries the main irony. A "reality show" usually means a staged, edited version of life, but here the real show is the unscripted one that everyone is cast in, with no off switch and no editing. Nothing in the poem lectures about mortality. It lets us laugh along with the narrator for one line and then discover that the joke is on the audience. What stays with us is the image of the tar, because it offers no consolation.