Reality TV fast becoming a blood sport

News With Views ^ | June 11, 2009 | Ellen Makkai

[ellenbrewster]

If Reality TV degenerates at its current pace, families will soon tune in to a trendy new show, “You Bet Your Life.” But it won’t be a Groucho Marx game show re-run. Over TV dinners we’ll be watching some poor soul competitively killed--not a digitized cartoon, mind you, but gladiator-style and for real.

We 21st Century sophisticates fancy ourselves more civilized than the Roman hoards who packed arenas and roared their approval with every bloody collapse. But today’s Reality TV revenues disagree. The more perverse the program, the higher the viewership.

[JSDude1]

Yes, and I knew this was coming all along. There is already a movie in the works about this (even though it was done 20+ years ago already with RUNNING MAN-and better).

This society will be as bad as in “the days of Noah”-I don’t know what this means completely but this debauchery seems long on its’ way toward that..

[Bratch]

[Bratch]

OOPS! Meant to post this.

[Lesforlife]

[Global2010]

Our country is morphing into the Modern days of Nero/Rome and throwing the Christians to the Lions for entertainment.

[BP2]

Don't forget “The Running Man”

Ben: Killian, I'll be back.
Damon: Only in a re-run.

[ChrisInAR]

I noticed you had the words "News With Views" posted here & I thought it was from Pastor Chuck Baldwin's website.

I wondered what was going on, 'cuz for some idiotic reason, the FR Powers-That-Be wouldn't permit my attempting to post an article from there. Could it possibly be that NWV is too conservative for FR?

[Publius6961]

Show me an idiot who watches any reality show whatsoever, and I'll show you a pathological loser I would never want to deal with under any circumstances.

[ellenbrewster]

Oh dear, I confess I watched one or two, maybe three (at least as much as I could stomach) in prep for the op-ed. Don’t kick me to the curb just yet!

[SuziQ]

Running Man was my first thought, too!

[Richard Kimball]

Back in 1990, Dave Barry wrote a column and joked about creating a show called Eat Bugs for Money. Reality TV passed that several years ago on a show, I can't recall the name, but they had people do stuff like tightrope walk and eat disgusting stuff. half the contestants were men and half women.

Anyway, here's a list of all the reality TV shows.

[Travis T. OJustice]

Fear Factor.

[AxelPaulsenJr]

Show me an idiot who watches any reality show whatsoever, and I'll show you a pathological loser I would never want to deal with under any circumstances.

Depends on which "reality" show one watches. For example, "The Amazing Race" is really a very fine and well done show.

[Richard Kimball]

That’s it! I watched it a couple of times, and could have seen myself doing anything on there except eating the stuff. The other things were like “How much guts do you have?” The food eating stuff was like “How much will you degrade yourself?”