I've never liked reality television very much. I may be a proud nerd now, but as someone who spent a lot of time in recovery from social awkwardness, I find it extremely uncomfortable to watch people make fools of themselves, especially when they don't know they're doing it. So I have mixed feelings about the reality television backlash stemming from Jasmine Fiore's brutal murder and DJ AM's death by drug overdose. Obviously, it shouldn't take such dreadful things for people to realize a fairly simple truth: that relying on extremely unstable people is going to produce uneven television.
But apparently, it has. Whether these events produce an actual change in viewers' tastes, rather than simply in production companies' scruples seems pretty up in the air to me at this point. But in such a terrific era of television, it's something of a mystery to me that reality television has lasted this long and spread this widely. There are other, better options out there, that don't rely on or relish the enormous flaws and inconsistencies of people who have decided to turn their life into something like art.