In our first article, we took a look at social networking sites, MMA and the rise and fall of poker. In article #2, we will take a look at tabloid entertainment programs, reality television programs featuring judges and homegrown celebrities.

– We used to be big fans of Entertainment Tonight. The program used to feature previews of upcoming movies, interviews with celebrities and behind the scenes footage at award shows. This was the standard until Access Hollywood launched in the mid 90s. Now, there were two programs that featured the same type of features on the entertainment industry and its stars. As if two wasn’t enough… let’s throw in shows like ‘Extra’ in for good measure to make it a threesome. The overcrowding came to its peak when the E! Entertainment channel launched and featured extended versions of these programs 24 hrs. a day for anyone eager enough to watch this stuff all day long.

The problem came when each program tried to diversify their content from each other in order to stand out amongst the bunch. The rise of the paparazzi also created an atmosphere where anybody who could get the latest gossip or fetch the latest photo would get the ratings boost needed to beat out their competition. Ratings mattered more than ever and friendly celebrity chats and movie previews wasn’t what was going to be bringing viewers in anymore. Viewers wanted the dish on their favorite celebrities and would move to whichever channel had the goods on their favorite celebrity pals.Entertainment news was thrown out of the door and replaced by entertainment gossip programming. The rise in celebrity gossip and tragic ratings news events would bring about entertainment gossip clones like ‘The Insider’ or ‘TMZ.com’ who cared more about trashing celebrities rather than honoring them. We’d love to find out about an upcoming movie or find out what a certain celebrity thinks about their upcoming flick but unfortunately shows like Entertainment Tonight now feature stories on former celebs losing 50 pounds through liposuction or what celebrities are now in rehab and we must switch over to hardcore geek websites devoted to this type of stuff.

– The are too many reality programs that are over saturating the entertainment industry today. The whole genre of ‘reality television’ in itself is overpopulated. The expansion of reality programming is so bad that there is now even a reality programming channel that was created just to fill the need for this type of programming since there is so much of it readily available. One of the more swollen versions of this programming has to be judge or courtroom daytime drama television programs. One of the first to be on television was “The People’s Court” which came before reality programming made it big. The show was canceled once but was brought back from the dead thanks to the rise of reality programming and other judge television programs like ‘Judge Judy’.

Judge Judy was probably the one that got the ball rolling again thanks to her ‘in your face’ attitude which became a hit with viewers. Soon, everybody tried to become the next ‘Judge Judy’ and we had people like Judge Alex and former boxing referee Mills Lane giving their orders to both the plaintiffs and the defendants. There would also be other judges who would try to be the opposite of Judge Judy and become more compassionate in the courtroom like Judge Joe Brown or Judge Hatchett. The People’s Court has been around since 1991 and now features a sexier Judge in the hopes of getting a bigger television viewing audience. The problem with all of these shows is that they feature the same type of content. None of these programs feature real dramatic court cases involving murder or robbery or other violent crimes. Instead, all of these shows feature cookie cutter crimes such as late rent payments, car payments, feuds over cash advances and other arguments that would hardly hold up in a small claims court. All of these shows are the same- The only revolving theme is the judge (same court drama,different judge).

-The rise of the internet has helped to launch many new celebrities who will get their 15 minutes of fame. Regular celebrities must now contend with people who put a video up on the internet and within days are suddenly being viewed by millions of people at a time. These newfound celebrities often will last about as long as it took us to write this article as someone new will come along and eventually replace them as the darlings of the media world. Everyday there is a new video that is being posted to websites such as youtube.com or Ebaum’s World that will have people talking and helping us to replace the previous videos that we had locked into our minds.The internet has allowed us to view videos from anywhere around the world and unfortunately it’s become a bit of media overload with us taking in too much information that our brains can’t handle.

These homegrown celebrities won’t last very long and unfortunately take time away from the musicians/television/movie stars that could probably use the extra exposure for something that took a much longer time to create rather than something that took less than 15 minutes to create with a camcorder. Examples of some of these stars include the star wars kid,numa-numa, Perez Hilton ,the creators of Jib-Jab.com,lonelygirl15 and many, many more to come as soon as you click away from this article on to any other media driven website.Stay tuned for the conclusion of our series of articles very shortly where we discuss digital cable channels, magazines and celebrity reality shows…

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2011 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.