That giant thud you heard sometime over the past two weeks was the sound of pop culture hitting rock bottom. While we're blessed with living in the Golden Age of Drama — "Mad Men," "Breaking Bad," "Boardwalk Empire" — we're also cursed with some ugly dramatics.
The most disturbing example is "Big Brother," CBS' lounge-lizard version of "Survivor" in which 16 confined strangers compete to be the last one evicted from luxury accommodations.
There's nothing wrong with the premise, but something is seriously messed up about this year's cast.
According to realityblurred.com, which has the excruciating task of tracking reality TV, many of the current contestants' behavior would have civilized roommates bolting for the door and heading someplace more tolerant — like a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
Aaryn Gries, a 22-year-old college student who appears to be majoring in playing with her hair, has vomited a flurry of offensive comments about Asian-Americans, black and gay people, insults unfit for a family newspaper. Spencer Clawson, a 31-year-old train conductor, went off the rails when he concluded that medical torture performed by Nazi doctors was beneficial and praised Adolf Hitler's speaking abilities.
Kaitlin Barnaby, 23, one of the two Minnesotans in the house, said she likes gay people, but that they're "untrustworthy in a game like this." (The most offensive thing about the other local contestant, 23-year-old pizza deliverer McCrae Olson, is that he wears his University of Minnesota T-shirt way too many times without a wash.)
Most viewers don't have a problem with these kind of comments — because they don't know about them.
In the episodes CBS airs three times a week in prime time, such disgusting barbs are edited, presenting a whitewashed family focused solely on collecting the $500,000 grand prize. Only diehard fans who sign up for a 24-hour feed on cbs.com or watch two hours of live coverage of "Big Brother After Dark" every night on the TVG channel are getting the complete picture.
