When it's late at night and I really need to wind down I watch mindless TV. You have to give your head a break sometimes and filling it with non essential information is a good way to chill and let your brain drift toward sleep. The last couple of nights though really got me thinking because the mindless TV was making me think too hard. Years ago to be a celebrity you really had to have something going on..Like being a real movie star or music icon or just someone a bit above everybody else in your visibility to the public. I remember standing in line with John Lennon at the Sutton Theater on east 57th street -Feb 1974 to see Blazing Saddles. That was a moment!. Now you have the new culture of celebrity. I will call it "Niche Celebrity". You have all of these cable channels and all of these shows. If your face is on one of them you're a celebrity. How I got to this was watching TMZ the other night. One of the segments was "We saw xxxxx coming out of Boa steak house in LA". Someone says-Who is he? The response was "he is on a show about repossessing cars on True TV" I was blown away!!. i shouldn't be. You're getting attention because you reposes cars and it's shown on TV (after going to On Demand and looking at the show I could see it was totally staged!!) There are shows on towing,parking cars, digging for gold,lumber jacks, modeling,cooking,pawn shops and even real TV shows about crime etc on dozens of TV channels. Now we are creating thousands of "niche celebrities" and they actually believe they are important. The bar is very low out there and for this to happen it has to be because people are bored and watch way to much TV and gravitate to in some cases a lower denominator. There are some people I do Admire-The Deadliest Catch blows me away. These are real men and they work an incredibly dangerous job-but then flip over and you get The Bad Girls Club-crazy ass chicks who want to kill each other all living in the same house. The ratings are really big.
So it's all about reality or the phony reality celebrities that are created by this environment. Years ago we had B movie stars and television stars who we felt were a part of our lives. Now we're in the instant society and instant celebrity.You can be instant if you video goes viral. Ok,where does my rant end? it ends with the fact that it may get worse before it gets better. Alot of the public likes crap on a daily level. They will want to see it more extreme as the years go by. who knows the next thing could be using real bullets on shows-we're headed in that direction. Now excuse me while I go "like " the repossessing guys Face Book page.
Peace, Jason