Entertaining possibilities

I disappointed myself by spending most of the day reading Entertainment Weekly today. I've had a subscription pretty much since 1994, when I first moved up to Purdue, and they pile up pretty quickly. Inevitably, there are some I want to keep for various articles or features, such as their "Best of" lists, but as I sort through them I come across issues that I realize immediately I don't want to keep, but some articles in them deserve a second read. So I'll end up reading a dozen articles I've already read in the course of throwing the magazines they're in away, and I end up spending hours at it. Sometimes, they're even good enough I decide I want to keep that issue after all, but usually not.

I have a pretty impressive collection of useless entertainment trivia built up in my head after a decade of reading EW cover to cover every week, and I've been trying to figure out how to put it to good use. I recently signed up for the Wheel of Fortune e-mail list, so I can be notified when they're scouting in the area and try to get on the show. I think I could do well at that one. Jeopardy is a little too arcane for me, but I should probably apply for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as well. The questions on that show were sometimes criticized for being too easy, and I think it's still on at 12:30am or something, with a different host.

Reality TV seems to break down into two subclasses: the game show writ large (Survivor, The Apprentice, Fear Factor), where the game takes over the contestants' lives for a period of time, anywhere from a day to several months; and relationship dramas (the Real World, Wife Swap), where there aren't any winners or losers, just people in a fishbowl making entertainment for everybody else. I don't watch much of it, but of the ones I have seen, the more real the better. For instance, the first season of Survivor, which I caught bits and pieces of, seems fundamentally different from the subsequent seasons just because now everybody's ready for their close-ups. They're all aspiring actors/models/TV show hosts, and they see spending weeks on the show as the means to get there, rather than an end to itself. Survivor's hardly alone in that respect, but it kind of started it all in the U.S., and all the rest of these shows now start out infected with that mentality, which is probably one reason they face diminishing returns. The whole genre has been on the wane for the last couple years, so we can look forward to more crappy sitcoms that at least employ writers, if nothing else. Maybe the competition has resulted in better scripted shows, I don't watch enough to tell, but Lost is my current favorite, and that show would've never gotten made without suits willing to take chances.

How's that saying go? "Necessity is the mother of invention." How about, "Desperation is the mother of risky programming"? I like the sound of that.