Television is too vast an enterprise to ever fit neatly into any year-end-story box. But there are years in which a certain thematic unity can be found among the biggest moments, hit shows, and most powerful narratives of the television season.
This year, that common ground is reality TV - specifically, the spread of the reality TV sensibility not only throughout the medium, but through the larger culture.
Reality TV was already year-end news in 2000 with the debut of Survivor (CBS). By the start of last year, it was a programming staple. But this year, the evolution of reality TV goes beyond changing the kinds of programs that have dominated the prime-time landscape for more than 50 years to altering the very ways in which we see the world.
The year started on Jan. 6 with PBS airing "Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family," a documentary about the controversial life and last days of Loud, the first person to be made into a quasi-celebrity by reality TV some 30 years ago. And now it comes to a close with Paris Hilton, a very similar quasi-celebrity, generating her own kind of cultural heat in a new Fox reality series, The Simple Life.
Loud was part of the California family that in 1971 allowed a team of filmmakers to move into its home and record the family members' everyday lives. When the 12-part series, which included a gay teen-age Lance coming out onscreen, aired on PBS in 1973, it caused a cultural firestorm; The New York Times damned Loud as "an evil weed." Loud, who died in 2002 of Hepatitis C at the age of 50, never escaped the somewhat notorious persona created in An American Family, the series that many media historians consider the start of reality TV.
The 22-year-old Hilton had helped create her own notoriety via a sex video that circulated online before The Simple Life premiered. That reputation is, in fact, exploited to help sharpen the highly contrived culture clash between Hilton and the rural Arkansas family with which she and her Beverly Hills friend, Nicole Richie, are living in a reality TV version of the 1965 CBS sitcom Green Acres.
As naive as we today might consider the television audience that made a sitcom as goofy as Green Acres a top 10 hit by the fall of 1966, at least viewers of that era understood it was fiction. Television wasn't trying to present Green Acres as anything but a make-believe sitcom played for escapism and laughs.
