Cheap production costs drove hundreds of reality shows into every conceivable attention-capture niche

Evidence

Indeed, over the next decade, there would be almost three hundred new reality shows trying almost every conceivable permutation of attention capture tricks, including talent shows (American Idol), launching your successful start-up (Shark Tank); pathology voyeurism, formerly known as freak shows (Hoarders); variations on a theme of The Real World (Jersey Shore, group living featuring the Italian American “Guido” subculture), celebrity family life (The Osbournes, showing the ordinary domesticity of former Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne); women marrying for money, men for trophy (Million Dollar Matchmaker); making it yourself—a better life through real estate (The Million Dollar Listing). And then there were the truly bizarre experiments, for instance, a match-making game show on which the contestant chooses a husband from among twenty men wearing masks—the kicker: it’s called Mr. Personality and hosted by the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The shows were so cheap to produce, no idea was deemed too ridiculous to try. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 848

Categorization

• CANDY: Mr. Personality — a masked-husband dating show hosted by Monica Lewinsky — is a genuinely tweetable absurdity.
• SEED: The full catalog of reality-show attention tricks reads as a taxonomy of desire — a possible essay angle on how each format weaponizes a specific human insecurity.
• XREF: connects to: Reality TV blends real and staged content to harvest attention cheaply — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 853; Reality TV traded narrative craft for cheap manipulation that mirrored ordinary viewers — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 235; Production costs per viewer, not popularity, drive what gets televised. (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Reality TV blends real and staged content to harvest attention cheaply #expands (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 853
• Production costs per viewer, not popularity, drive what gets televised. #corroborates (0.85)
• Late-90s television desperation produced increasingly bizarre reality shows #expands (0.78)
• Reality TV traded narrative craft for cheap manipulation that mirrored ordinary viewers #expands (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 235
• Fame shifted from costly earned status to broadcast and reality-driven attention #expands (0.72)