Word: americanizing
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...what message is it all sending? The viralization of people like American Idol's General Larry (Pants on the Ground) Platt and William Hung before him has led to the charge that reality TV invites us to laugh at little people for sport. The fame of Jersey Shore's tanning-bed casualties and others brings the critique that reality TV celebrates violence, sluttiness (male and female) and other bad behavior...
...celebrate them at the same time? In fact, the audience's relation to reality shows is more complicated. People don't watch Jersey Shore because they consider the Situation a role model. It's entertaining because the show is basically satire, a pumped-up spoof of bigger-is-better American culture. (Quoth Jwoww: "I see a bunch of, like, gorilla juice heads, tall, completely jacked, steroid, like multiple growth hormone - that's, like, the type I'm attracted to.") (Read about Joel Stein and Kevin Smith's experience watching Jersey Shore...
Lost, for instance, began as an attempt to create a drama version of Survivor. Several of TV's best comedies - the American and British versions of The Office, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development and Modern Family - have borrowed directly from reality TV's format of vérité filmmaking and "confessional" interviews with the characters...
Maybe the best example yet of the reality-fiction alliance is Fox's high school choir spoof Glee, which, in essence, is American Idol in teen-dramedy form. It is a literal re-creation of the pop appeal of Idol (just like Idol's, Glee's songs fly to the top of iTunes on a weekly basis). And it's also a critique of the American Idol culture that made it possible. In the words of Rachel (Lea Michele), "Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor...
...past decade has seen experiments like documentary maker Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days for FX, a brilliant trading-places switcheroo. (For instance, an anti-immigration militant spent a month living the life of an illegal alien.) Wife Swap is an intriguing show about American subcultures (homeschoolers, political activists, etc.) and the natural tendency of parents to secretly judge one another. TLC's 19 Kids and Counting, about the fecund Duggars, may be an extreme-parenting freak show, but it's also a series about the life of a deeply religious family, a rare subject for TV dramas today...