No, it's a valid criticism and opinion. Reality TV is crap. All of it. There are no exceptions. The entire genre needs to be pulled out, then trampled on, burned, shot, kicked and finally buried deep in an abandoned salt mine.
Well, you know you're exaggerating and saying things that just aren't true. I'm only interested in an honest, logical discussion, because that's the best way for us to learn about these things.
I don't include interview shows or game shows or documentaries and so forth. The standard stuff they've always had on TV. I mean the banal tripe that lies to the viewer that what they are seeing is "reality".
You're just fooling with definitions so that they fit what you say. Equivocation, if-by-whiskey, etc.
I am not interested in this type of thing.
Know why it's being pushed so strenuously? Of course you do. It's CHEAP! Cheap to make, produce, write ("write" - yeah, there's a concept). It's easy - there is no hard work involved in reality TV.
Cheap does not equal lazy. Cheap does not equal low-quality. El Mariachi was incredibly cheap and it was a good movie that had a lot of work behind it. You're confusing terms and throwing out equivocations left and right. It's both wrong and exhausting for me to read and correct.
Maximum profit, minimum investment and overhead. Properly hyped, it is not difficult to convince an American couch potato audience that this is "really good".
Now you're pulling out the standard elitist "attack the audience" strategy. This will actually only do three things:
1) Pump up your own ego by implying to yourself that you're smarter than everyone else.
2) Make you ignore negative responses to your work by pretending that your work is so great that it's above everyone's head.
3) Free you from ever acknowledging that something you've written might not be working, and thus stopping you from going back to the drawing board and learning more about the craft.
None of those three things do you, me, or the audience any good. If you want to learn, you have to check your ego at the door.
If they bought that Britney Spears is "really good", then of course they'd buy this reality TV line too.
It's really awful, is what it is. The very definition of putrid. Now that is a strong opinion, I'll grant you. But it is also a valid criticism.
That is
NOT a valid criticism. Do not claim so again because you are making this conversation a total mess.
A valid criticism of a show would be "it's boring," because that directly effects whether the show is good or not. You cannot have a perfect show if it is boring.
Your criticism is the same as saying "this show stars someone with blue eyes." Whether the star has blue eyes does NOT effect in any way whether it is a good show or not. It is not valid. The genre of a show does not have any direct effect on whether it is entertaining, original, or the product of hard work.
It's exactly that mentality that leads to bad producers rejecting great scripts. They point out things that might correlate to a few bad movies that came out recently, but which, in and of themselves, do not make the script bad.
