Popular Reality TV

America’s Got Talent ’s fifth winner, Michael Grimm , received only about $200,000 as his prize for winning the show, which advertises its prize as $1 million. That’s because he took the lump sum, instead of getting paid over time, and During the show’s second season, I analyzed the fine print of the show’s $1 million prize in detail , discovering that it was worth about $375,000 after taxes, but that was based on 2007-era assumptions about tax rates. The key is that the prize is not $1 million: it’s $25,000 a year or a lump sum. The Sun-Herald reports that Grimm ultimately received “a little more than $200,000, he said, once the network got its cut of more than 50 percent and he paid taxes on the lump sum he received.” It’s not clear what NBC’s “cut” means, whether he had to pay them something, or if it’s just referring to the reduced value if one opts for the lump sum. Sunday, Grimm’s grandparents moved into a new house; theirs was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and Grimm vowed to...

For eight single professional females gathered in Dallas, it truly is holy Wednesday – the evening each week that they gather in one of their houses for the Traveling Bachelorette Party. Munching snacks and passing a wine beverage, they cheer, cry and cackle as their spiritual leader, Trista Rehn, braves heartache, indecision as well as the occasional recitation of bad poetry to choose from among her 25 swains. Yet a thing is unsettling Leah Hudson’s stomach, and it’s not simply the wine. “I hate that we have been sucked into the Hoover vac of reality TV,” says Hudson, 30. “Do we not have anything better to complete rather than to reside vicariously through numerous 15-minute-fame seekers?” There there is a substance of reality TV’s good results: it truly is normally the one mass-entertainment category that thrives due to its audience’s contempt for it. It makes us really feel tawdry, dirty, cheap – whether it did not, we most likely wouldn’t bother tuning in. As well as in this, for ...

The Amazing Race has its final three teams, and they do not include Nick and Vicki, who were left behind and out of the running once they missed a flight. Instead, Jill and Thomas, Brook and Claire, and Nat and Kat are racing for $1 million next Sunday, when Phil Keoghan teased that he’d have an “exciting announcement about next season of The Amazing Race,” but we already know that it’s this or this —or both. Along with others, I assumed there would be an equalizer, probably a flight, that would erase the consequence for Nick quitting. But I was wrong: Nick and Vicki departed (at a suspiciously unannounced time) and arrived at the airport just as the other teams were boarding a plane to South Korea. I was convinced that this was just another bit of editing trickery, and then when the show returned from the break they’d get tickets and get on the plane. But no! “I’m afraid Korean Airline is leave already,” a ticket agent told Nick and Vicki, putting them on the next available flight, ...