Trend: Reality TV Shows Crashing

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but one thing that’s tanking right now even worse than the stock market is reality-TV programming. And I have to say: I couldn’t be happier. The industry got drunk on this stuff early in this decade, after “Survivor” scored big ratings. (Of course, MTV’s “Real World” had developed the genre a decade before, and PBS programs like “An American Family” had gotten there even earlier.) I knew we had reached the nadir for this junk when I first saw an ad, about a year ago, for “Ice Road Truckers.” If reality television had reached such a narrowcast place, surely it was the beginning of the end. Here’s hoping.

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