Popular Reality TV

Minute-long title sequences are a thing of the past on Survivor, host Jeff Probst revealed. “We are using very short main titles this season - too much story to waste time on this… they’ll never be :60 again,” Jeff wrote on Twitter. He said that during his live tweeting of the show, which CBS now smartly advertises on-screen before the episode starts, and which now happens twice, once for the east coast broadcast and once for the west coast broadcast. It’s part of Jeff Probst’s expanding online empire, which now includes his new web site , where he now recaps the show instead of on Entertainment Weekly’s web site. Jeff’s frequent Twitter usage is already being mocked by a satirical “not Jeff Probst” , a sure sign that he’s doing something right, but Jeff has unfortunately started to follow Nigel Lythgoe’s Twitter footsteps and lash out at fans, asking one if they were “high” and and telling a critic of his tweeting “bite me.” And his live-tweeting of the show—twice, which is impres...

In a few months, HBO will once again fictionalize the creation of a famous work of nonfiction , although this time it’s the reality series that started it all: An American Family . The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini stars as Craig Gilbert, the producer who followed the Loud family for the 1973 PBS series, while Pat and Bill Loud are played by Diane Lane and Tim Robbins, while Thomas Dekker plays their gay son Lance Loud. Robbins and Lane, along with the film’s directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, talked to TV critics Friday, and it was an occasion for some reality TV bashing on the part of some critics who simultaneously demonstrated their ignorance about the original series, but also yielded some surprising insight. First, James Gandolfini said that The Real Housewives of Atlanta is “extraordinary”: “I have seen Housewives of Atlanta. That was extraordinary. It really was.” But when he got the inevitable Jersey Shore question, he just shook his head and said, “No, no, no...