There Was Only Ever One *Real* Reality TV Show

How Strip Search accidentally broke its own format in its misguided quest for drama

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I’ve never liked Reality TV. I watched EDtv, and I saw the Truman show, but more importantly, I watched friends’ and family members’ world views changing rapidly before my eyes in a way that scared me.

Image by Gemini

This story really begins, however, with two pivotal events; one that took place in the year or two before I began studying for a Master’s in English Literature, and the other a couple of years later during my first year back on campus.

Hillman and McKenna

I’ve read a heck of a lot of weird theories about our physical and psychological evolution, but Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge is one of the most out-there-yet-compelling I’ve encountered. Any claims about events and complex evolutionary relationships that took place that long ago are unreliable at best — not to mention filled with long gaps — but as Richard L. Currier argues convincingly in Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink, it’s one of the few fields where absence of evidence really isn’t evidence of…