The Reality TV Bubble Bursts?

The press is telling us that the reality TV bubble has burst.

It seems to me too early to tell if this is really the case.

If so, while I have sympathy for the workers in television production who will experience this as another blow to the job market in which they work, the genre is a vile thing. The showbiz "wannabes" passed off as "ordinary people" crammed into a house to scream at each other and degrade themselves in stupid games and contests. The rich idiots making a global media spectacle of their raging stupidity, vulgarity and narcissism. The business-themed competition shows where millionaires put billionaires whose luck they pass of as genius on pedestals so that they may sit in judgment of supposed hopefuls of similar success in a pageant of conformism and aspirationalism at its most cruel and stupid. On and on it goes, all of it not just lowest common denominator in thinking and deeply retrograde in its attitudes, but thoroughly unpleasant to look at or contemplate for any but the most warped mentality in a way that puts me in mind of the quote attributed (very likely, incorrectly) to the philosopher George Santayana: "Americans love junk. It's not the junk that bothers me, it's the love."

Ordinarily I am not bothered by people loving what some would consider junk, and indeed even defend their right to unapologetically love what may be indisputably junk without qualification (hence my distaste for such terms as "guilty pleasure"). However, the world would be a better place if this particular type of junk never existed.