Life and Death and Television, For Real This Time

I've been known to watch Bravo from time to time, mostly against my will, but sometimes if there's really nothing else on. The Real Housewives of [BLANK] series is a year-long revolving door of various "urban" (but really usually suburbs of the urbs, except maybe in the case of NYC) settings, most with fruit-related imagery/graphics involved. While I was never a fan of the characters, plots, setups or scenarios, I could appreciate what the series as a whole tried to do most of the time--give a maybe-slightly enhanced/exaggerated (like the housewives themselves usually) peek into wealth; explore how power and prestige can ultimately corrupt, or at least make a little bit crazy/delusional; ask the audience to either judge, laugh, both, or GTFO. These shows are pretty unapologetic, and despite the content, that can be admirable.

This article over on the AV Club highlights an extremely dark, tragic situation that arose in front of television cameras for The Real Housewives of Orange County (see? Oranges). Shows like these can be all fluff and no substance, and sometimes that's what we're looking for, no more. But when you constantly point your cameras at something, you're going to catch more than the faked, contrived, preconceived storylines that you're expecting to catch. Completely by accident, you might see something real and human and utterly devastating. I don't necessarily recommend checking out the series, but the article is worth reading if only to defend the existence of reality television and remind us that for all of our snark, reality TV personalities are people too.