Word: idol
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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...
...content mill for the cable-tabloid-blog machine, employing human punch lines like Rod Blagojevich, the disgraced governor turned contestant on Celebrity Apprentice. It's everywhere. When Scott Brown won an upset Senate victory in Massachusetts, he was joined onstage by his daughter Ayla, an American Idol semifinalist from Season...
...concerns that the show's popularity raised seem so quaint now: a professor worried its success would lead to "Let's try a public execution. Let's try a snuff film." We're still waiting for those. But Survivor is still on - considered, together with the likes of Idol and The Amazing Race, to be relatively tame, even family-oriented entertainment. (See pictures of American Idol winners...
...these factors together, and reality TV's endless stream of candidates seems inevitable. Every winter, American Idol's audition rounds attract a deluge of self-created characters, who have the formula for getting on national TV down to a science. "I'm the crazy accordion lady/ This is my song," yowls a blue-haired young woman cradling a squeeze-box. The advanced descendants of the costumed screwballs who tried to get Monty Hall's attention on Let's Make a Deal, today's reality performance artists put on virtual costumes - the Bitch, the Horndog, the Drama Queen - to get noticed...
Miller went so far as to characterize Pinker’s views as representing a belief that “human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism...