Reality TV as Symbol of the Twenty-First Century

As was to so often be the case in the twenty-first century, what as late as the '90s was satire proved a slight thing next to the obscene reality of just a few years later when the reality TV boom brought the collective dementia of The Truman Show to life, and the courtiers and claqueurs of the entertainment press "normalized" it and its multiplicity of stupidities and vilenesses, which seemed likely to go on forever because of the addiction of the media-industrial complex to stupidity and vileness. But it may be that the readiness of the public to accept particular forms of stupidity and vileness have their limits, spelling the beginning of the end (rather than just the end of the beginning) of the reality TV format if we are to go by what the entertainment press tells us.

It would probably be too much to read into that the beginning of a saner new era--but I welcome the development nonetheless.