Run away!

After the Giants game, I watched... maybe... seven seconds of the new meta-realty show Joe Schmoe. That was all I could stand. I am 47 years old and this is beyond me. True, two years ago I watched and enjoyed Big Brother, but that was when they had almost real people on the show; this summer's version of BB is filled with fit 21-year-old eye candy -- who needs it! Schmoe is essentially a triple-layered satire of shows like BB. You have the contestants, the big house, the one-way mirrors, the syping cameras and microphones. But in this case, the whole thing is actually a send-up of reality shows; the "contestants" are all actors playing parts in a reality show, as if to satirize it. But wait -- satire is not the point. The point is the degredation of the only cast member who is not in on the gag -- he thinks it really is a reality show. And the television audience is in on the joke from the beginning.

And so fucking what? It's not like a reality show has any reality, much less realism, in the first place -- we're not exactly talking The Truman Show here. You know what I think? I think they tried to make a funny satire of reality shows, and they realized, shit, this is just not funny, it's impossible to satire this crap because it never took a live breath in the first place. But they had all this footage. So they realized, hey, we can salvage this by making it about degredation. Let's reshoot a few scenes with Clyde, making him look like the patsy, and then we'll shoot a bunch of interviews giving the audience an "inside view" of the whole thing. Then maybe we'll have something.

I'm making it sound much more interesting than it really is. But I ask you: after an atrocity like Dog Eat Dog, just what is there left of reality tv to satirize?

And why the hell am I writing about it in the first place? Simply to express my increasing astonishment and alienation with American culture. I know, I'm not exactly going out on a limb here by criticizing reality tv. And yet millions of dollars are expended in its production and broadcast. Well, I gues it's cheaper than a war. If you're a Hollywood executive, the worst you can do is make bad television. Just think what you can do if you're president.