Popular Reality TV

April 1 »     by Andy Dehnart / April 1, 2011, 9:00 AM This satirical, fictional story is part of the April 1, 2011, edition of reality blurred . Happy April Fool’s Day. Apple will use its iTunes software to host a singing competition modeled after American Idol, The X Factor , and The Voice called American Voice Factor , and it will air episodes both online and on truTV. Singers will audition by uploading video to iTunes, where new technology will screen their audition immediately. If it is less grating than Katy Perry’s “Firework,” the contestant will move on to the next stage, where he or she will gather as many “like”s as possible on iTunes’ social network Ping. Because iTunes barely functions on PCs, an Apple insider said that the company expects auditioners to be smart, creative, interesting, financially solvent people with reality television-worthy senses of entitlement and superiority who own Macs and are thus so slavishly devoted to Apple that they actually use Ping. Two epi...

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Tonight, a six-part reality series on PBS explores circus life as goes behind the scenes of the Big Apple Circus, a one-ring, European-style circus. The series, called simply Circus , was created by the same people who produced last year’s Carrier , which took cameras on board an aircraft carrier. The series finds its cast members in transition, from the retirement of its founding artistic director to the hot gay twin juggler who’s ending their act by heading off to medical school while his brother stays behind. It’s simultaneously an overview of circus life today and a more intimate portrait of its cast members, though a different kind of intimacy than, say, Bravo’s unscripted series offer. The pace is slower than a typical reality show, but that’s part of its charm, and the first hour tonight builds to a pretty dramatic series of events. (The six-hour series airs two hours over each of the next three Wednesdays; check your local PBS listings for times.) What really stands out to me ...