THE TV CRITIC VERSION OF STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: Given a choice of watching my own death, in sluggish motion, coif to a soundtrack of emo bands or an episode of The Hills, I�d take the previous without a moment�s vacillation. Still, the mere cosmos of MTV�s hot gain �reality� show fascinates me to no end � but non enough to actually contemplate watching the thing.
My misgiving is that for TV critics and other people somehow concerned with the viability of the medium, knowing that The Hills is out there is like searching out the highest brow to check the planet-killing asteroid arc across the sky on its way to closing all life sentence on earth; you know it�s out there, and that null will of all time be the same over again, but there�s nothing you can do to full stop it, so you�d mightiness as well enjoy the brilliant, perfervid, jagged cicatrix it�s cutting through the atmosphere.
Time magazine�s James Poniewozik has it bad for The Hills, as he confessed in a panegyric to the show published last hebdomad. �Yes, The Hills is fake,� he admits right off the top of the inning. �Fake in the signified that producers and participants acknowledge re-shooting scenes and doing multiple takes. Fake in the sense that MTV's beautiful �stars� are famous for little more than organism on The Hills. And fake in that it's proof that a beautiful shot and a well-chosen soundtrack toilet imitate emotion in regular the most banal scene.�
On second thought, though, Poniewozik prefers the word �artifice� to �fake,� and his enthusiasm for the show is hardly deterred by words like �shallow� either. �It all sounds shallow, and, O.K., it is,� he practically swoons. �The surfaces are precisely what make The Hills enchanting: it is possibly the best-looking series on television system. It doesn't just look better than life. It looks better than TV. Where well-nigh reality shows use cheap close-ups to show red-hot emotions, The Hills uses middle- and long-range shots in wide screen, giving it a cooler feel and framing the subjects like art photography. It's full of liquid L.A. sun, in dearest with the way light plays on surfaces - car bodies, plate glass, glossed lips.�
Poniewozik has plain penetrated much closer to the nerve of The Hills� appeal � an appeal that�s obviously on that point, though I�ve been absolutely unable to divine its precise nature, or accession any voice of myself, past or present, that might sustain responded to The Hills' very limited but thoroughly chronicled slice of life. �It's life, if you were offspring, lucky and beautiful and had your own cameraman and soundtrack curator,� Poniewozik insists. �If this is sham, maybe reality is overrated.� More to the point, it�s hard to imagine that other networks aren�t aegir to learn the lesson being taught by The Hills� success, which is that if this is reality TV, then perchance fake TV is overrated.
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