Excerpt
Reality television needs reformation.
As a longtime fan of even the louchest reality shows — “The Bachelor,” “America’s Next Top Model,” you name it — I never thought I’d say that. Reform, I long believed, would cost the vaudeville genre its freaky and subversive status as a fact-fiction hybrid. We’d lose all the surprises, comic and dramatic, generated by reality’s artful and mischievous line-walking.
But the suicide of Russell Armstrong, a middle-aged investor with financial problems who appeared as a rich middle-aged investor on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” on Aug. 15, has convinced me otherwise. I should have said something sooner. The whole genre needs an overhaul. The longtime modus operandi of reality television has damaged the shows’ participants, the TV business and the public trust.
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