What is the single most influential sentence written for television in the last 25 years? Here’s my nominee: “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a loft and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.” For viewers of a certain age, the word “taped” alone should strum a chord of nostalgia. In the spring of 1992, those words opened the first episode of the first season of MTV’s The Real World — reality TV before air quotes and billions of dollars in revenue got draped around the phrase. Some critics, who had no idea that a revolution was beginning, dismissed the series as “painfully bogus” and “excruciating torture,” while the New York Times called it “the year’s most riveting television.”
It turned out to be a very short leap from seven strangers picked to live in a loft to 16 strangers picked to compete on an island. And it has been a very steep plunge from there to the September 7 premiere of Fox’s Utopia, the self-described “social experiment” that marks the first of fall’s new network series and, barring a turnaround that just isn’t gonna happen, the season’s first large-scale disaster.
This attitude, when stripped of O’Connor’s unsparing awareness of the hypocrisy and moral ugliness it embodies, represents a kind of comfort to people who feel alienated or angered by anything or anyone they don’t understand — it tells them that if they grasp people as types, they know all they need to know and don’t need to tax themselves with empathy, or even with specifics. Bingo. Honestly I'm surprised (and relieved) this show is bombing. We the People aren't as mindless as Fox would like to believe.they both understood that you had to have certain things before you could know certain things.
Oh. Oh my. Based off of this article, I hope this show quickly and quietly burns away and is forgotten about. I had no interest in watching it to begin with, and this makes it seem even worse than I would imagine.I’m not sure why a white man casually comparing a man of color to a gorilla in a cage on a major American network is not being discussed as a benchmark moment in the recent history of TV racism...