Word: idol
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...added the exclamation points, but you get the idea. Yes, viewers are tuning in to Joe Millionaire, The Bachelorette and American Idol by the tens of millions. Yet, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, never have so many watched so much TV with so little good to say about...
...because its characters are the kind of hard-to-pigeonhole folks you find in life--or on reality TV. On Survivor and The Amazing Race, the gay men don't drop Judy Garland references in every scene. MTV's Making the Band 2--a kind of hip-hop American Idol--gave center stage to inner-city kids who would be portrayed as perps or victims on a cop drama...
...really satire boiled down to one extreme gesture. A great reality-TV concept takes some commonplace piety of polite society and gives it a wedgie. Companies value team spirit; Survivor says the team will screw you in the end. The cult of self-esteem says everybody is talented; American Idol's Simon Cowell says to sit down and shut your pie hole. Romance and feminism say a man's money shouldn't matter; Joe Millionaire wagers $50 million that they're wrong...
Indeed, for all the talk about "humiliation TV," what's striking about most reality shows is how good humored and resilient most of the participants are: the American Idol rejectees stubbornly convinced of their own talent, the Fear Factor players walking away from vats of insects like Olympic champions. What finally bothers their detractors is, perhaps, not that these people are humiliated but that they are not. Embarrassment, these shows demonstrate, is survivable, even ignorable, and ignoring embarrassment is a skill we all could use. It is what you risk--like injury in a sport--in order to triumph. "What...
...days of British musical domination are gone, and are unlikely to return any time soon. Even if they do, the Brits will probably be riding the wave of global music rather than driving it. But no matter. In Britain and throughout Europe, there's reason to cheer. The Pop Idol-driven drivel that controlled the charts in recent years seems to have peaked. Great music is being made in the U.K. and finally being recognized. Just ask the Brits...