The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #63.1: Reality Television

General Introduction
– And you know what that means!
– Backlog of emails
– A female listener!
– Toward a Christian Conception of Satire
– A long digression about Steve Taylor
– Post on our message boards
– A long digression about academic conferences

Defining Reality Television; or, Is Michial a Hypocrite?
– No scripts for actors
– Scripting and editing
– The affordability of reality TV
– Stupid teenagers

Tracing It Back to Its Source
– An American Family
– Revolutionary and controversial
– Documentary vs. reality television
– Striving for something higher
– The Real World, Gilmour’s favorite

The New Game Shows
– How Millionaire changed everything
– Surfeit of time
– Lack of screening
– Contempt and admiration
– In praise of The Weakest Link
– The Real World with a prize
– Fear Factor as the end of civilization
– How Kurt Cobain is implicated in all this
– Dating shows

The E!-ification of Cable Television
– Nathan defends Kim Kardashian
– Two sorts of celebrities
– On the rise of the celebrity dating show
– The Soup

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?
– Facebook as reality television democratized
– The American Idol phenomenon
– Nathan Gilmour’s karaoke picks
– Celebrity narcissism
– Major and minor fame

Recommendations
– Project Runway, for very strange reasons
– The Weakest Link, again
– Penn and Teller Tell a Lie, if you can stand Penn Jillette
– Morgan Spurlock: Good or evil?