Related Articles: When Life Is Like a TV Show
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Keeping Up Appearances
10/2/2009 12:00:00 AMLate last year, Nene Leakes was evicted from her five-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot house in Duluth, Ga. According to the legal notice, she and her husband agreed to leave because they couldn't afford the rent. That would put her in good company, but the eviction was especially damaging to Leakes, because for her, living in an expensive home isn't a choice. It's a job requirement.
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The Limp Factor
8/14/2009 12:00:00 AMWe TV is rolling out the fifth batch of its docuseries The Secret Lives of Women, which rummages through the dirty laundry of the fairer sex. Munchausen moms, phone-sex operators, and Wiccan priestesses reveal their unorthodox lives and the lengths to which they go to maintain them. There's no equivalent show for men, and if there were, even the title The Secret Lives of Men would sound silly. Men, it seems, don't have interesting secrets, and as TV fodder, they're worthless.
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Auf With Their Heads: The ‘Project Runway’ Roundtable
8/14/2009 12:00:00 AMWe always try to look our best during our NEWSWEEK roundtables—we've done the Oscars, the Emmys, and more—but sometimes you can't help a fashion emergency. Just minutes before our Project Runway roundtable was set to begin, one of us stained a shirt collar with a big, ugly blob of makeup. Oy. How would we make it work?! Like a mother hen, Tim Gunn swooped to the rescue, wielding a fierce weapon: the tide stick he carries around in his bag. As he dabbed and blotted, he not only saved the day but also gave pointers about how to save the shirt.
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Bigger Bubbies Make You Bold
6/25/2009 12:00:00 AMAll of these made great television. But it also sent some unorthodox health messages. We're not the only ones pondering questionable health information on reality TV. In 2006, researchers for the Kaiser Family Foundation reported on the positive and negative effects of shows like The Bachelor, Fear Factor, The Biggest Loser, and Extreme Makeover in a paper called "The ‘Reality’ of Health: Reality Television and the Public Health." Among the problems cited by authors Peter Christenson of Lewis & Clark College and Maria Ivancin of American University were the fact that these shows overemphasize the importance of physical appearance, downplay the risks of plastic surgery, and "often place contestants in situations that reward risk-taking behavior." Younger viewers, they write, may try to imitate stunts because they don't understand that the danger for contestants is tightly controlled by producers.
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Reality TV Hates Women
6/3/2009 12:00:00 AMI'm thinking of becoming the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the Bravo network and WE tv. Why not? Suing a television network would be far from the weirdest lawsuit ever brought by an American. There's a woman that sued the city of Detroit over her co-worker's strong perfume. And don't forget that $54 million suit against the Washington, D.C., dry cleaners that lost a judge's pants. Why shouldn't there be a legal way for me to punish these networks for the damage they've done to American women? I'm talking about programs like Bridezillas, Real Housewives of Wherever and all those other "reality shows" that sound like porn. (Women Behind Bars? Wicked Attraction? What do those names say to you?)
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