- Serena Williams' Butt Goes Jet Skiing
- K-Fed Spotted buying donuts
- Hugh Hefner's B-Day -- The Party to Die For
- Dr. Dre and Joanie "Chyna Doll" Laurer spotted walking on a beach
- Chesney Goes Topless with Playboy Chick
- Brittney Spears ALMOST goes to jail AGAIN!
For those of you unfamiliar, these are the kind of headlines you’ll catch with Harvey Levin's 30 excruciating minutes of the obnoxious TMZ TV- AOL Time Warner owned gossip show, shown daily on your local Fox affiliate.
Tune into an episode of this and you will be bombarded by terrible video clips, and paparazzi photos of B-list celebrities going about their daily lives. And there’s no actually articles or stories to go along with these images, it’s nothing more than mere “witty” anecdotes and put-downs from Harvey Lenin and his army of smug “employees.”
What I find the funniest about TMZ TV is between these clips and photos they will cut to an office scene with Harvey and these obnoxious people sitting in their cubicles, passing around their campy remarks. And when something amusing or somewhat clever is said, the head honcho, Harvey walks over to his clear erase board and writes it down, as if that makes them look like they have legitimate office jobs, and they are participating in some sort of a diligent business meeting. I kid you not.
They have a website as well that’s equally revolting. It’s so distasteful and nauseating that I always have to click away before I can remember to look for anything remotely amusing. I can find nothing entertaining or redeeming in any of the site's content, and if I do, it’s the same as the show; there’s NO actual information, it’s just their stupid remarks and anecdotes on a photo. It's all just base and poorly written and arbitrarily amoral. I mean good god let's try to have a little style while we ruin people's lives, eh? Making a mockery of these people is what’s paying your bills after all!
So do you know what's funny about TMZ? Why is this show is still on the air?
No, I'm... uh, I'm actually asking.
Are people drawn to the crude, mean-spirited humor? Maybe they are the types that feel better about themselves if they can put down well-known celebs who make gobs more money than they do doing almost next to nothing. The only legit reasons I can think of for people to actually enjoy TMZ would be maybe they like to follow fashions of what celebrities are wearing, or maybe they just like seeing the ridiculous lifestyles these spoiled people live are entertaining to them. Or perhaps, viewers think it’s their responsibility to call out spoiled stars for the stupid shit they do.
Things like this disturb me, but what bothers me even more is the insatiable greed with which many people devour celebrity gossip. They feed on it, almost as though it gives them sustenance, and I'm greatly concerned that our society has become dependent on knowing whether or not Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton have become friends again. It seems we are more concerned with what celebrities are doing with their endless wealth than what our own family members are doing on the other side of the country.
Very nicely written.
ReplyDeleteI believe your last comment held alot of weight and would've been great to have seen expounded on: "It seems we are more concerned with what celebrities are doing with their endless wealth than what our own family members are doing on the other side of the country."
Nice work.
I strongly agree with you. I hate this show. Whenever it comes on I have to change the channel. There is no point in watching it. At least in Extra they have some sort of formal way of presenting stories, but in TMZ its so informal its stupid. Overall very well done. The only thing I would add is to try to find people who like this show and add in why they like it because like you I have no idea.
ReplyDeleteI strongly agree with you, too, but that's actually a weakness of the piece, I'm afraid. This assignment called on you to try to figure out your subject, not like it, so when you're still asking, as a legit question, why does anybody like this, towards the end of the piece, that's a real disappointment--that's just the question I was hoping you'd help me with! I think the piece would get a little more traction with that key question if you looked in detail at one specific episode of TMZ, in something of the same kind of spirit as Laura Kipnis reading Hustler. She doesn't hate Hustler any less when she's done, but she understands something about its appeal that she didn't before she held her nose and closely studied it (and washed her hands, as well as any other affected parts, immediately afterwards). You write just as well as ever but you don't quite get the job done here, I don't think. That's too bad, because some insight into the appeal of this godawful phenomenon--again, NOT the same thing as learning to love it--could really tell us something about the often-troubling culture we inhabit.
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