This week in TV land: Reality!

First of all, I want to be clear in stating that I'm a huge fan of reality television. After all, television is thoroughly entertaining, and reality is, well, a somewhat amorphous concept that can be used to describe everything that can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted. With this information alone a prehistoric ice man might assume that Real World, where shameless narcissists have absurd and heavily edited but not completely scripted interactions with each other on television for infamy and an unlimited supply of alcohol (appealing, I know), was the extent of reality television. Not so, with the rise of the modern reality family, who has done nothing to become famous except being rich and related to someone who, in 1996, probably would have just been another housemate on the Real World. Like the concept of Life Water (seriously, I can't stress enough how much it grates me that life and water, a redundancy to be sure, can be slapped on the same packaging and wrapped up with juice concentrate and sugar), Reality Television is a wonderful opportunity to redefine the meaning of a word in order to subjugate and coopt it to a greater and nobler cause: Cashmoney.