Thursday 2013-05-30, 12:00am
Bridezillas enters its final season. A reflection on what it means to hate-watch over time.
Bridezillas enters its final season. A reflection on what it means to hate-watch over time.
A look back at The Joe Schmo Show, Spike’s reality-TV hoax that rewards viewers’ over-familiarity with reality TV with a broad satire of its tropes and conventions.
Few shows are so recklessly obvious about their goal of wish fulfillment as to actually name the fictional setting Paradise. Bunheads, however, is not like most of American television’s offerings.
When Enlightened premiered at the end of 2011, its parent network, HBO, promoted it under slightly false pretenses: There was Laura Dern—her mascara smeared, her mouth contorted into an expression somewhere between a heaving sob and a rageful shriek—as “the new face of tranquility.” It played the cognitive dissonance for laughs, setting up a slapstick show that would play off Dern’s endlessly pliable face in order to heighten its inner tension.