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Kindle Notes & Highlights
If the ’70s had given off the funk of a stained shag carpet after a basement orgy, the ’80s were more like a plastic slipcovered sofa in the living room, ready for company.
Sounds about right to me
Both Cocaine Blues and “Stop the Madness” were a perfect reflection of the dizzy, contradictory “Just Say No” era, which is to say, they were best watched while stoned.
Every time a free AOL disc frisbeed into someone’s mailbox, it felt like an invitation to dial in, then confess, anonymously, to strangers. Mixing the internet with reality TV was the speedball of pop culture.
Reality TV producers were adrenaline junkies; you got no sleep and little money, but you had the chance to play God.
Maybe the Bravo lineup lacked the “visual panache” of prestige cable, Hirschorn wrote. But shows like The Real Housewives reflected something authentic, if you knew what to look for. They were mirrors of the bleakness of supposed privilege, reflecting themes that scripted drama had never captured, a fractured world in which “financial anxieties, fraying families, and fear of aging leave inhabitants grasping for meaning and happiness as they steer their Escalades across Southern California’s perfectly buffed, featureless landscape.”
