By presenting caricatures of our own oddities, these programs demonstrate how society sets parameters for normalcy and how we all move in and around those barriers, which are changeable and nuanced. Ultimately, the genre exposes the muddiness of distinctions that we may perceive as crisp and clean. The boundaries that we draw between the normal and the freaky aren’t “real” in any universal sense. And the monsters we reject are not as different from us as we’d like to believe. We’re all just a bunch of fudge-stripe cookies away from being in the wrong category. Reality TV is both a guilty goody
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