Everything old is pitched again
: Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360 is my favorite show on public radio (by which I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise; it really is a good show: provocative, intelligent, imaginative, connected, like its host).
Just sample this week’s commentary on the latest fad to eat TV (but I’ll remind you: all fads die when the fun runs out), the “reality” trend. And there’s more coming:
Sony television is developing Human Resources — in which unemployed schnooks, ordinary people without any special talents, compete to win an ordinary 9-to-5 job.
Then there’s The Will, a new reality series due to air on ABC starting sometime next year. In The Will, the friends and family members of a rich person will compete to inherit specific items from the rich person’s estate after he or she dies. And certain friends and relatives will get disowned, on television, by a vote of his or her fellow heirs.
I thought somebody dying would kill this trend. I think a “reality” show exploiting death may be the nail in the coffin.
: Just saw that Elizabeth Spiers also blogged this. She must be an Anderson fan, which beats being a Franzen fan.
