Critic’s Notebook: Reality Shows Reached for Extremes in 2012

The character, Rick Salter, is talking about a wildly successful reality competition show he created in which contestants undergo various kinds of torture: they’re deprived of food one week, branded the next week, and so on. The show becomes a national phenomenon, finding the perverse side of the public taste, until things spin out of control.

Rick, incidentally, is undergoing torture of his own. He spends most of the novel trapped under a gigantic entertainment system in his house, which has toppled, pinning him beneath. We learn about “The King of Pain” as he looks back on the show’s epic rise and fall while waiting for someone to come along and free him from his metaphorically apt prison.

The novel is by Seth Kaufman, a Brooklyn writer whose résumé includes time at TVGuide.com and as a reporter for Page Six at The New York Post. And it seems particularly appropriate for 2012, a year in which the reality genre offered some stunning fare.

There were shows and one-shot specials whose mere titles were jolting: “I Was Impaled,” on Discovery Fit & Health; “Wives With Knives,” on Investigation Discovery; “My Giant Face Tumor,” on TLC. There were series that insulted whole groups of people, like “American Gypsies,” on the National Geographic Channel, and “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding,” on TLC; and “Breaking Amish,” on TLC, and “Amish Mafia,” on Discovery. There was — again on TLC, easily the leader in this type of sludge — “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”

Which should lead us all to do some-soul searching here at year’s end. Was 2012 a nadir for reality TV? Can the offerings possibly get any worse in 2013? Is “The King of Pain” (Sukuma Books), amusing as it is, the last satire that will ever be written about reality television because the genre has become too ludicrous to parody?

Mr. Kaufman, at least, isn’t worried that reality-TV reality is going to make reality-TV fiction unwritable.

“At first glance you might think so, but parody and satire are proving quite flexible these days,” he said in an e-mail interview. “ ‘The Daily Show’ and The Onion make us laugh when we should be furious or heartbroken. So I think reality shows — from the petty, freak-show vérité soap-docs like ‘Real Housewives’ to weirdo-docs of ‘Extreme Couponing’ and ‘I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant’ to ‘enter-pain-ment’ shows like ‘Survivor’ and ‘Killer Karaoke’ — will continue to provide a lot to laugh and wince at.”

And talk about.

“As long as channels can market these shows so they remain in the national conversation at work, on Facebook and in the news, reality TV will continue to be fertile subject matter for anyone interested in modern culture,” Mr. Kaufman said. “And that’s because the questions posed by reality TV are endless. Are we what we watch? Are these shows abusive? Does that make us voyeurs for watching them? Or is it O.K. because, hey, the contestants are exhibitionists?”

And, he noted, “There are many world events that make you think it is reality that is un-parody-able, not just reality TV.”

A scan of the most appalling reality shows of the past year may be cause for dismay, but people who work in the genre note another side to the spectrum.

“I think there’s a lot of redeeming reality television out there,” said Jason Carbone, founder of the production company Good Clean Fun and executive producer of shows like the Style Network’s “Tia & Tamera,” a likable and relatively circumspect show about the adult lives of twins who were stars of the 1990s comedy “Sister, Sister.” “I think that it’s probably not as loud as some of the shows.”

Mr. Carbone suggested that, like every type of television, reality TV has cycles, with current trends perhaps influenced by viewers’ need to forget the economy. “They like to feel better about their own lives,” he said, “and reality TV offers up a lot of people whose lives are far worse than our own.”

View the original article here

Tentative Deal Is Reached to Raise Taxes on the Wealthy

While some senators pushed for a quick vote on legislation to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, the House was not expected to consider any deal until Tuesday at the earliest, meaning that a combination of tax increases and spending cuts would go into effect in the first days of 2013. If Congress acts quickly and sends a deal to President Obama, the economic impact could still be very limited.

Under the agreement, tax rates would jump to 39.6 percent from 35 percent for individual incomes over $400,000 and couples over $450,000, while tax deductions and credits would start phasing out on incomes as low as $200,000, a clear win for President Obama, who campaigned on higher taxes for the wealthy.

“Just last month Republicans in Congress said they would never agree to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Obviously, the agreement that’s currently being discussed would raise those rates and raise them permanently,” Mr. Obama crowed at a hastily arranged news briefing, with middle-income onlookers cheering behind him.

In a  development that pushed lawmakers closer to a resolution, Senate Republicans said negotiators also agreed to put off $110 billion in across-the-board cuts to military and domestic programs for two months while broader deficit reduction talks continue. Those cuts begin to go into force on Wednesday Jan. 2, and that deadline too might be missed before Congress approves the deal.

The nature of the deal ensured that the running war between the White House and Congressional Republicans on spending and taxes will continue at least until the spring. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner formally notified Congress that the government reached its statutory borrowing limit on New Year’s Eve. Through some creative accounting tricks, the Treasury Department can put off action for perhaps two months, but Congress must act to keep the government from defaulting just when the “pause” on pending cuts is up. Then in late March, a temporary law financing the government expires.

And the new deal does nothing to address the big issues that President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner hoped to deal with in their failed “grand bargain” talks two weeks ago: booming entitlement spending and a tax code so complex few defend it anymore.

Though the tentative deal had a chance of success, it landed with a thud on Capitol Hill. Republicans accused the White House of “moving the goal posts” by demanding still more tax increases to help shut off across-the-board spending cuts beyond the two-month pause. Democrats were incredulous that the president had ultimately agreed to around $600 billion in new tax revenue over 10 years when even Mr. Boehner had promised $800 billion. But the White House said it had also won concessions on unemployment insurance and the inheritance tax among other wins.

Still, Democrats openly worried that if Mr. Obama could not drive a harder bargain when he holds most of the cards, he will give up still more Democratic priorities in the coming weeks, when hard deadlines will raise the prospects of a government default first, then a government shutdown. In both instances, conservative Republicans are more willing to breach the deadlines than in this case, when conservatives cringed at the prospects of huge tax increases.

“I just don’t think Obama’s negotiated very well,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa.

But as night fell over Washington on New Year’s Eve, senators seemed worn down and resigned. “Everybody by this time is angry, but sooner or later this has to be resolved,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Jennifer Steinhauer and Robert Pear contributed reporting.

View the original article here