Word: shows
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...best reality shows can be 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...
...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...
There's plenty to criticize in Undercover Boss. The show is moving but it's also manipulative and infuriating. Yes, O'Donnell hands out raises and rewards to the nice people we've met. It makes him (and us) feel good. But company-wide - economy-wide - there's no reason to believe things will get better for the overstressed workers who didn't get on TV. (See more about the television...
...here's the thing: you, watching the show, have the tools to come to that conclusion. You've held a job. You know how companies work. And one thing reality TV has trained people to do is to be savvy about its editing. That's how people watch reality TV: you can doubt it, interrogate it, talk back to it, believe...
...either way, what you're left with is a prime-time TV show about topical concerns, at a time when people would like to see some humility in our CEOs; a show, like Discovery's Dirty Jobs, about toilet cleaners and garbage pickers and other people that "quality TV" rarely takes notice of; a show, at heart, about how absolutely crazy-hard ordinary people work...