It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
That was always my frustration with so many of these shows, because design is not an ambush... it's a relationship. You have to know how people move and live and work to be able to design for them.
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.
There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies.
Reality TV is sleazy, it is manipulative. It is as momentary as anything in popular culture.
I think it's a lot easier to put together a reality show than to actually create a scripted show.
I think that reality TV is so bad. It is a tool by the media to not make people think.
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
Even though reality TV is very manipulated, it's all manipulated so that something real happens. And so, our job in this era is to make that real thing happen, because nobody wants to see any more manipulated, pre-planned performances. That era is over.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
I think feature films sell on the idea, and I think TV works based almost entirely on execution. I don't think anybody is going, 'Wow, that show is executed poorly, but the idea is so cool I just have to keep watching.'