Human Cockfighting

Talk about burying the lede. As sad as the accidental death of Buckwild cast member Shain Gandee is, it's a fairly logical consequence of the various stunts he and his castmates were encouraged to do as part of the "show," though of course these were things they were doing in the first place

As always, I'm more intrigued by how these sorts of antics constitute a program series, an associated group of episodes with with a cohesive narrative of plot and characterization, in the traditional Aristotelian sense. Yes, there are archetypes, even in cultural edema such as Storage Wars and Redneck Intervention. But at what point do otherwise sensible people take stock of their lives and ask, if only of themselves, not only why there is something on the teevee called Redneck Intervention but why the holy fuck they are watching it?

Gandee's mother, deep in the article, actually makes some decent points about the escapism aspect of this nonsense. But even there, what are they escaping, and is this the best we can do? Is this all working people have available to them to avoid thinking about the wretched futility of their lives until the next slave shift, watching drunken hillbillies molest farm animals and each other?

Thousands of years from now, when we're all just dust and distant memories, it will be interesting to see how future archaeologists perceive this metastasized cultural tumor of "reality" teevee.