Quote of the Day (Emily Nussbaum, on Reality Shows)

“For these viewers [of reality shows], there was no controversy — any qualms about the medium had faded, long ago. The most successful reality show had it all: a titillating flash of the authentic, framed by the dark glitter of the fake, like a dash of salt in dark chocolate. No taste was harder to resist.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV (2024)

The image accompanying this post shows Teresa Giudice from Real Housewives of New Jersey: Reunion. A question: with all the catfights, real or manufactured, that this and other reality shows have inspired, why would their “stars” want to get together for reunions?

A second question: Why did Bravo want to bring my state into further disrepute by creating a whole niche in its wildly successful franchise here? 

If you want to know the truth (a slippery element when dealing with this genre, I grant you), I don’t watch reality shows for the same reasons that I don’t watch wrestling on TV: they’re fake and they convey an awful impression of this country to the rest of the world. Had they been around before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we would have lost the Cold War for sure.

I see that, from 2017 to 2022, U.S. exports grew by $489 billion. But why do I get the queasy feeling that so much of this increase came from franchises of these fake shows marketed abroad?