Whenever I do catch an eyeful, it usually consists of one of three things: a talking heads news channel, organized sportsball, or a Reality TV show. The first I try to ignore they're usually triangulated on the tabloid newspapers with added eye candy, then dumbed down: as information sources this century, TV news channels are useless.
The sportsball I leave to my spouse who is prone to lecturing me interminably about Manchester City. But the latter phenomenon—Reality TV—has all the grisly attention-grabbing potential of a flaming school bus careening out of control into a public execution: I basically have to leave the room in a hurry to avoid having my eyeballs sucked right out of my head by the visual media equivalent of internet clickbait.
Luckily, my glimpses into this surreal hell-world are usually transient, a side-effect of my spouse channel-hopping between football matches. The sector is dominated by a couple of competing recipes. Mythbusters was the classic competence-porn show although it deteriorated into the explosion-of-the-week club after a few seasons : using science!!!
Incompetence porn Reality TV, as pioneered by Big Brother, usually aims to get the audience to laugh at or mock the participants in a contest designed to humiliate the subjects. Instead of dropping a fit expedition leader on a desert island, the show dumps a bunch of washed-up B-list celebs in a wilderness of mosquitos and no soft toilet paper.
Or perhaps it's a bunch of Armani-suited sociopaths in a boardroom where they're expected to pitch business start-up proposals at a washed-up B-list business celeb like Alan Sugar or, in the American version of "The Apprentice", a certain mobbed-up New York property speculator with shady Russian banking connections.
