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...break down reality TV roughly into two major subgenres. The first - the big competition-event show - descends from Survivor and includes most of reality's big hits: Idol, The Bachelor, The Amazing Race, The Biggest Loser, Project Runway. These shows mainstreamed reality TV for bigger, broader (and older) audiences by applying it to familiar genres: game shows, singing competitions, cook-offs, dating shows...
...much more engrossing, complex and diverse than your average TV cop show. Last year The Amazing Race included the team of bisexual screenwriter Mike White and his gay minister father Mel White, giving a more nuanced, less stereotypical portrayal of both sexual orientation and faith than most big-network dramas would...
...these MTV shows as big or as widely hyped as Jersey Shore (which got nearly 5 million viewers for its season finale)? No. But that is on you and me, not on reality TV. And even in the cheesiest reality shows, there is an aspirational quality, a democratic quality, a quality that's - yeah, I'll say it - American. "American" in the sense that what is true of countries is true of TV genres: their worst traits are inseparable from their best ones...
...Humility to thy Industry! Well, that's one strain of American values. But there are other American ideas that reality TV taps into: That everybody should have a shot. That sometimes being real is better than being polite. That no matter where you started out, you can hit it big, get lucky and reinvent yourself. In her own way, Jwoww is as American a character as the nobody Jay Gatsby heading east and changing his name. (See TIME's 2000 cover about reality...
...Rock," "Burning Love") and the merely fabulous ("Got a Lot o' Livin' to Do," which accompanies an ecstatic amusement-park bit with high-bouncing superheroes). Of course the climax is "Viva Las Vegas," with 40 Elvis impersonators and a dozen chorines filling Mark Fisher's staircased set and the Big E back onscreen, overseeing the riot of color and movement...