#16: A Little Too Real
Today, reality TV is ubiquitous; any situation—cowboys, little people who make chocolate, women being tricked into thinking they’re marrying the prince of Great Britain—can be turned into entertainment for the masses. Some of it is compelling, and some of it is downright awful, but what you can’t deny is that it’s absolutely everywhere.
It’s become so widespread in recent years that it’s easy to think that it’s a modern phenomenon; we clutch our pearls and imagine that reality TV came about as viewers got stupider and media standards got lower, and we tell ourselves there was some golden age of TV where things weren’t so trashy and dumbed down. But no, there was reality TV as early as in the 1970s, and it sounds like it was as much of a disaster back then as it is now.