The Real Housewives. (Bravo)

Good ladies of RHONY, we knew thee well. According to several outlets, the stars of Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York City have refused to ink contracts on the sixth season of the stalwart show, with all six main cast members holding out for a better deal.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the issue is, as always, money problems:

Production on the sixth season was set to begin on Wednesday, but none of the six women made herself available for filming. A Bravo representative declined to comment.

The cast members all negotiate separate deals and are paid different amounts, depending on how long they have been with the show. However, each cast member is said to have expressed displeasure with Bravo's financial offer. Negotiations are said to have begun about three weeks ago but little progress has been made. "We're still pretty far apart," the source says.

The issue with raising the salaries of these ostensibly already wealthy (though that grand illusion has been shattered time and time again) women, is, as Page Six tells it, that Bravo would have no qualms about canceling the show all together than belabor a negotation that has already stalled production.

And we know that the network can be heartless when it comes to slicing up the cast--as it showed when it fired three members before last season--though dooming the entire program to cancelation would still seem like a pretty desperate measure, especially since the cast already receives such disperate salaries. (An average member earns $65k per season, though Ramona Singer has been rumored to make $500,000 and has been holding out for a million.)

Which leaves us wondering: What has Bravo been doing with these contract problems since the last season, giving all the money to the guys at Million Dollar Listing: New York?

Richard Hell. (Photo by Iniz & Vinoodh)

In January, I was on the Bowery with Richard Hell, who invented punk rock. We went into an art bookstore on Bond Street and he found a collection of pictures by Richard Prince. After a minute, he jabbed me on the shoulder.

“Check this out!” he rasped, surprised, pointing at the book. It was a picture of Richard Hell, decades ago, wearing the ripped-shirt, short-hair look, his mane black and spiky, smiling with full lips, a crooked nose and purple sleeplessness under his eyes. “I didn’t know this was in here.”

The photograph was taken in the early 1980s, when Mr. Hell still played in the Voidoids, gigging a half a block away at CBGB, the now-gone Bowery rock club largely credited with housing the first yelps of punk. The younger version of himself must have been on his mind, as Mr. Hell has an excellent new memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, that describes that wild, reckless and important era in downtown Manhattan with candor, wit and reverence. He and his spiky hair discovered CBGB back when he was in the band Television and began a residency on Sunday nights. Then came the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and Patti Smith. The story is not only about rock ’n’ roll, but also about the city experiencing a creative renaissance even as it nearly went bankrupt.

These days, the block by CBGB is stainless and pretty. The onetime beer-soaked punk den now sells fashionable variations on Ramones leather jackets for thousands of dollars. Nearby are luxury hotels, prohibitively expensive apartments and sidewalks clean enough to lick. It’s the only Bowery I’ve ever known, but for Mr. Hell, sometimes, it’s still the New York he once escaped to, the dirty Bowery where he started punk rock.

Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers in Kentucky, but he was not long for that name or that state.

“My favorite thing to do was run away,” he writes on the opening page of Tramp. “The words ‘let’s run away’ still sound magic to me.”

At 17, he hitchhiked down south with a prep school pal and future bandmate, Tom Miller, another misfit who would later change his name to Tom Verlaine. The teenagers made it just across the Florida border. As Mr. Hell recalls their escape in his book, the two friends were in a green world, humid and happy, something almost prelapsarian.

“We didn’t know anybody there,” he writes, “or know anything about the place except that it was warm and airy, and there was plenty of citrus fruit and seafood, and girls who smelled like suntan and had little particles of sand on them here and there, including inside the waistbands of their panties.”

The duo got snatched up by cops and sent back to school, but they would run away together again. Mr. Verlaine eventually joined Mr. Hell in New York, where he was trying to break into the downtown poetry scene (their adoptive surnames nod to those star-crossed Symbolists, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, whose first book was called A Season in Hell). Mr. Verlaine had another idea: they’d start a band, with himself on guitar and Mr. Hell on bass. They were first the Neon Boys, then Television, and then Hell stumbled into that dive, CBGB.

The birthplace of punk was a garbage dump. In an unpublished column he wrote during the club’s formative years that is included in Tramp, Mr. Hell says, “the first thing I noticed is that it smelled like dogshit. Then I saw the damned dog.”

Mr. Hell agreed, after some wrangling, to meet for coffee at The Smile, right by Bowery and Bleecker and not too far from his apartment in the East Village. It’s a faux-rustic spot favored by models and fashion publicists. As we spoke, the Velvet Underground came on. A kid with zippers on his pant legs walked by. Mr. Hell—whose face has changed miraculously little since he was a young man, save for the goatee on his chin—was wearing a nice sweater but still had cigarette burns on his knuckles. No one recognized him as Richard Hell, maybe because he doesn’t dress like a punk anymore, or maybe because no one knew who he was in the first place. And he tended to downplay everything, speaking elliptically.

“It was an expression of how things were at that moment,” he said, describing the impact of Television, whose first album, Marquee Moon, is perhaps the most hyper-literate of early punk artifacts, a fancily dexterous but punishing record. Having helped forge the group’s downright mathematical guitar playing, Mr. Hell left Television just before the recording of Marquee Moon and went on to form the equally influential, slightly messier band the Heartbreakers. “It wasn’t like we brought something to the world that changed the world, it’s that the world brought us something and we acted on it.”

He was more forthcoming about the impact of his look. Hints of his music can be heard in any band with a guitar today—the raw genius of early Television before Mr. Verlaine kicked him out, the rollicking heroin stupor of the Heartbreakers, the art-damaged menace of his next band, the Voidoids, with whom Mr. Hell dubbed his epoch the “Blank Generation.” But his physical appearance—he cultivated a kind of Truffaut street-rat allure—is at least as enduring a contribution.

“I was amazed, walking by Macy’s in Herald Square, to see ripped-up T-shirts in the windows,” Mr. Hell told me. “That was just three years after I was in my first band, when I was the only person in the world wearing ripped T-shirts.”

In Tramp, Mr. Hell recounts Blondie guitarist Chris Stein showing him a European rock rag with a feature on a new band put together by British impresario Malcolm McLaren, who had booked Television a few shows in New York. Mr. McLaren had always been taken with Mr. Hell’s personal style, particularly how it expressed “alienation and disgust and anger” in the face of hippie love, as Mr. Hell writes. With that in mind, Mr. McLaren went back to England to put together a band called the Sex Pistols.

“Everyone in the band had short, hacked-up hair and torn clothes and there were safety pins and shredded suit jackets and wacked-out T-shirts and contorted facial expressions,” Mr. Hell writes of the Sex Pistols. “The lead singer had changed his name to something ugly. It gave me kind of a giddy feeling. It was flattering.”

The Sex Pistols would quickly cement themselves as the foremost figures of the punk scene, but the debt to Mr. Hell may soon be exposed. When the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its PUNK: Chaos to Couture exhibition in May, the first gallery, the portion devoted to punk’s first rumblings, will be represented by Mr. Hell. He’s also writing a preface to the catalog.

“I kind of assumed I wouldn’t be involved,” he said. “They asked me late, and people totally associate punk with the Sex Pistols. But fortunately, the Met did enough research to know that some of the stuff done by the Sex Pistols was influenced by me.”

If Mr. Hell embodied all of punk’s early promise, he also encompassed its darker side. In Tramp, he recalls his struggles with drugs vividly and without remorse. Though he’s now clean—and the book ends with him finally shuffling to N.A. meetings—this is no recovery story.

“How can I say I regret heroin?” he said to me. “It would be like saying, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be somebody else?’ It’s a meaningless thing to say.”

And anyway, as he puts it at one point, “sex pervades all.” Among the girlfriends he mentions throughout his narrative, all of whom he clearly worshipped, are teenage hookers, French chanteuses, married art patrons, Rolling Stones groupies, Andrew Wylie’s little sister, bassists, the door girl at CBGB and the doomed Nancy Spungen. Many of them overlapped. Men writing about their conquests are often boring; luckily for us, Mr. Hell is a regular Henry Miller when it comes to sex scenes. Take, for example, the following description of coitus with a 16-year-old, in Paris, a tryst that happened while Mr. Hell was waiting for a fiancée, Lizzy, to return from South Africa.

I bent her over the Corbusier. We were in our element. There’s a point where extreme, knowing drug abandon becomes a kind of delicious hell ... It’s like a ballet performed at 1/1000 speed and that’s how I put my granite hard-on into Ava and watched her face and watched her lips as she said something snotty and grateful to me, grinning, and meanwhile Lizzy was in the back of my mind and my heart was breaking, drily and brittle though, not as if I had any meaning to lose.

It’s like one of his songs in miniature: the corny hope that two chords and the right words can save your soul.

Mr. Hell, perhaps mercifully, stops his story in the mid-’80s, when he quits music to be a novelist, insisting that “a writer’s life is fairly uneventful.” There is, however, an epilogue, and it concerns what may be the most intriguing thread of the story, one hidden behind the debauchery of beautiful New York weirdos and the rise of a cultural phenomenon: the falling out between two best friends, Richard Meyers and Tom Miller, Rimbaud and Verlaine. In the time since their teenage trips down south, their struggles with words and women in New York and the pioneering of a new type of rock ‘n’ roll, the two have spoken only a handful of times.

“There are people in the book that I’m critical of that I don’t give a shit what they think,” Mr. Hell said of Mr. Verlaine at The Smile. “We don’t have a relationship anymore.”

(A representative at Mr. Verlaine’s record label told me the guitarist had asked him “not to request any interviews regarding Richard Hell.”)

After we left The Smile, he ended up buying that Richard Prince book with his picture in it. We left the store and went back out to the Bowery again.

“Well, you know, actually, it has changed,” he sighed, looking at the scrubbed stretch of Bowery at Bleecker Street. We crossed and stood next to the old CBGB, which now has the name “John Varvatos” printed on its storefront. “I can see people from way back, on this corner.”

editorial@observer.com

Update (8:44 p.m.): Current TV founder co-founder Joel Hyatt confirmed Al Jazeera will purchase the network in an email to staff this evening. 

Mr. Hyatt's email contained several interesting details including that Mr. Gore asked Colin Powell's for advice on working with the Arab network and "Colin Powell told Al that Al Jazeera is the only cable news network he watches." In the email Mr. Hyatt also revealed he and Mr. Gore will both serve on the advisory board of Al Jazeera America and that Time Warner Cable is dropping Current because it "did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera." Read Mr. Hyatt's full email below. 

Since its inception, Current has suffered from low ratings. In 2011, the network attempted to counter this by bringing on ousted MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann and former MSNBC contributor Cenk Uygur to help them re-brand with a focus on left-leaning talk. That experiment didn't help the network revolutionize its ratings. In March, Current acrimoniously parted ways with Mr. Olbermann and replaced him with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Last month, when asked about his show, Mr. Spitzer quipped, "Nobody’s watching, but I’m having a great time."

According to the Times, if the deal goes through, Al Jazeera won't use Current to distribute Al Jazeera English, which is based in Qatar. Instead, the company will begin a new, New York-based English-language venture. Though some Current TV staff members may stay on, Mr. Stelter wrote that the network's "schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring."

Al Jazeera has gained a growing audience with its journalism over the years, but the network has also earned criticism its coverage is anti-American.

Though he often uses Twitter to trash his (many) former employers, as of this writing, Mr. Olbermann has yet to weigh in on the rumored deal. Mr. Gore and Mr. Spitzer have also not responded to requests for comment from the Observer.

Joel Hyatt's email to Current staffers:

From: Joel Hyatt 
Date: January 2, 2013, 6:36:46 
Subject: BIG NEWS FOR THE NEW YEAR!
Al and I are thrilled and proud to announce that a few moments ago Current was acquired by Al Jazeera, the award winning international news organization. 

When considering the several suitors who were interested in acquiring Current, it became clear to us that Al Jazeera was founded with the same goals we had for Current: To give voice to those whose voices are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the important stories that no one else is telling. Al Jazeera, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us. 

Al and I did significant due diligence as part of our evaluation process. We were impressed with all that we learned about Al Jazeera and its journalistic integrity, global reach, award-winning programming, and growing influence around the world. That influence has recently been demonstrated by Al Jazeera’s important and impactful coverage of the Arab Spring, which was widely credited as being the most thorough and informative coverage from any media company. Colin Powell told Al that Al Jazeera is the only cable news network he watches (which he is able to do because Comcast carries it in the Washington, DC market).

As you may know, Al Jazeera is funded by the government of Qatar, which is the United States’ closest ally in the Gulf Region, and is where the United States bases its Middle East Air Force operations. I have had first-hand knowledge of Qatar’s policies as a result of my tenure on the Board of The Brookings Institution. The Saban Center for Middle East Policy is a joint venture of The Brookings Institution and Qatar, and it has offices in Washington, DC and Doha, Qatar. Its purpose is to propose practical public policies that can contribute to peace in the Middle East, and its founding Director is my friend, Martin Indyk, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

While considering this decision, I spent a week in Doha, Qatar, where Al Jazeera is headquartered, and I am pleased to tell you that I could not have been more impressed with their operation. First of all, they are bringing large-scale resources to journalism – something which we have not been able to do. Al Jazeera has more than 80 bureaus around the world, and is seen in more than 260 million homes in 130 countries. Al Jazeera has a staff of over 4000 people, including 400 journalists. Its journalists hail from more than 50 countries, with every conceivable nationality and religion represented on its professional team. Al Jazeera is a major global media player. 

The rest of the world thinks so too. Al Jazeera English has won many, many awards including an Alfred I DuPont Award for Best Documentary, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Awards for freedom of speech and expression, an Amnesty International Award for International TV and Radio, the prestigious Peabody Award, and the Huffington Post Ultimate Media Gamechanger award.

All of this is compelling, but what really convinced Al and me that Al Jazeera would be a great home for the people of Current was their publicly stated Values and Core Capabilities. Their mission includes the following: Diversity (“bringing stories from the underreported communities, societies and cultures from across the globe), Journalistic Integrity (“committed to the uncompromising pursuit of truth and the ideals of journalism”), and A Voice for the Voiceless (“promoting the basic human right of the freedom of expression for people everywhere”).

Al Jazeera is planning to invest significantly in building “Al Jazeera America,” a network focused on international news for the American audience. Al and I will both serve on the Advisory Board of Al Jazeera America, and we look forward to helping build an important news network.

Obviously there will be a lot of transition work in the coming weeks. Al Jazeera does not have a management team in place in the U.S to run this new venture. They are extremely impressed with our people and our accomplishments. I will be holding staff meetings in the next few days and will introduce the senior folks from Al Jazeera who have led the planning for this entry into the United States. (I will separately communicate as to the day and time for those staff meetings.) We will communicate more of the details of this acquisition during those meetings.

Getting this transaction done was very difficult. One of Current’s distributors, Time Warner Cable, did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera. Consequently, Current will no longer be carried on TWC. This is unfortunate, but I am confident that Al Jazeera America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years ahead. In the United Kingdom, it has become the number three news network (behind the BBC and Sky News). It did that by investing in great programming – as it intends to do in the United States. 

Al and I are incredibly proud of what all of us have been able to accomplish together. Throughout our short history, Current has been a thought leader for the media industry, innovating many exciting features that became standard after we introduced them. (Tweets on television anyone?!) Just this past year, we’ve been able to provide our viewers with fantastic interactive and social TV 2.0 coverage of the Presidential Election, including a peek inside the Obama Campaign headquarters, in depth analysis of the Libor Scandal, the breaking and relentless coverage of the Trayvon Martin scandal, and the list goes on and on. We have won most of the important awards in the journalism profession. We have stayed true to our independence and courage. And in our choice of new corporate parent, we are continuing to strive to make a difference – to provide the American people with information and analysis they need to live better, more secure, happier lives. I am confident this will continue into the future. 

As I reflected deeply about this decision – both to sell the company and to whom – I kept coming back to one basic notion: The purpose of journalism is to provide those who don’t know with information and knowledge so that they can become those who do know. Bias and hatred are fueled by ignorance. Information and knowledge are the only antidotes to that ignorance. That is the role journalism must play – to provide the knowledge that sweeps away the bias and hatred caused by ignorance. It is a noble pursuit. I am proud of each and every one of you for your dedication to pursuing that noble goal. And it is a privilege to have worked with all of you these past few years.

Please accept my best wishes for a happy, healthy, exciting and fulfilling New Year! 

All the best,
Joel

You don't want Rick Grimes as your boyfriend. (AMC)

Have you noticed that in the last several years, most of the "brilliant" TV shows on AMC, Showtime and HBO star these dangerous, psychopathic anti-heroes? From Dexter to Don Draper, Nick Brody to Rick Grimes, Walter White to the ultimate don, Tony Soprano, one gets the sense that while the rest of American culture is taking one step forward on progressive women's rights issues, our beloved TV shows are moving us two steps back.

And what's weird is how we love these horrible men. "I'm such a Carrie" no longer refers to the ultimate Bradshaw, but the bipolar Claire Danes on Homeland ... the kind of gal who falls in love with a terrorist, despite the fact that he ends up subjecting her to electro-shock therapy treatments after they have sex. And they are still in love, or something! How sexy is that, ladies?

But wait, it gets worse...

From Newsday.com:

A Williston Park man who police say shot his girlfriend in the back with a rifle after a heated argument over the television show “The Walking Dead” was ordered jailed without bail at his arraignment Tuesday.

Jared Gurman, 26, of 516 Marcellus Rd., is being held on a charge of attempted murder after the shooting at about 2:40 a.m. Monday at his apartment.

A single round from a .22 caliber rifle pierced the victim’s lung and diaphragm and shattered her ribs, police said.

It's a funny thing, too: a quick glance at the weapons used in The Walking Dead shows a lot of .22 caliber rifles ...

Mariska Hargitay as Det. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU (NBC)

The showrunner for Dick Wolf’s last standing Law & Order program, Special Victims Unit, was struggling to understand how people watch “marathon” sessions of the show he manages. “The children episodes are disturbing, even to us,” said Mr. Leight.

He singled out one such episode, entitled “Friending Emily,” in which detectives go to an FBI office to view images of abused children. Mr. Leight sounded shocked, tired and a little bit horrified over a detail that he and his writers chose to put in the episode. He sounded a lot, in fact, like SVU’s former protagonist, Elliot Stabler.

“There is a kid in diapers whose photo we show,” said Mr. Leight. “We found it on an Internet pornography site. It had 37,000 hits in the last four days.” (Which, it turns out, is the exact line that a government official says during the episode.)

“I mean, a bunch of us on the writing staff have children,” he said. “Nobody really wants to write this stuff. It’s dispiriting.”

The show may upset its own writers, but Law & Order: SVU has outlasted every other show that Dick Wolf created. It’s been two years since NBC nixed the original Law & Order, after 20 seasons. Even after the cancellations of two highly promoted spin-offs, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Los Angeles (not to mention an ill-fated fourth spin-off called Law & Order: Trial by Jury), SVU is still going strong.

It’s one thing to say that violence sells. It’s another to say that gruesome sexual attacks on the most vulnerable members of society, children, can power the remaining show in an unusually successful franchise. Even last season, when its ratings were at their lowest, SVU was still the sixth most watched show on NBC, ahead of 30 Rock, The Office and everything else in the Thursday night lineup. At its peak, SVU was able to topple the original Law & Order when they were on the air together.

What’s clear: people love watching Special Victims Unit, especially young women and mothers. In fact, since the show launched 13 years ago, females age 18 to 34 have been its most consistent viewers. “Two-thirds of our audience are women,” Mr. Leight said. “I honestly don’t understand why, completely. I don’t get it when parents say they watch the show with their kids, either.”

Lisa Friel, a lawyer who spent nearly 30 years in charge of sex crime prosecutions in the New York City District Attorney’s office, understands the impulse. Ms. Friel, who actually oversaw SVU-style prosecutions at work, used to watch the show with her high-school-age daughter, now 18 and a college freshman.

Some of the subject matter they may have encountered: an episode titled “Consent,” in which a young girl is drugged with GHB; the aforementioned “Friending Emily,” in which an older frat brother conspires with a newer pledge to kidnap and rape a high schooler and then broadcast the videos of her molestation on the Internet; and “Brotherhood,” in which a pledge-master is murdered after raping several women as well as the fraternity’s own pledges.

“It wasn’t like I was watching it with her when she was 7,” Ms. Friel told The Observer. “But when the time was right, when she was old enough and when I thought it was appropriate to start dealing with these issues, it was another way to open the dialogue.”

The writers’ lunchroom is plastered with New York Post and Daily News front covers, enough to extinguish one’s creative juices ... or appetite. Every Law & Order installment has a noted “ripped from the headlines” element, and at times the show has even presaged the news. During Mr. Leight’s tenure, for instance, SVU had an episode (“Personal Fouls”) about a basketball coach using his charity as a conduit for kids he could molest. The show aired “two weeks before the Jerry Sandusky story came out,” Mr. Leight noted, with a hint of pride.

As Gothamist asked its readers at the time, “Not to pull a total conspiracy theory here, but this particular story scales pretty high on the ‘just a coincidence’ scale, don’t you think?”

Mr. Leight explained that the story line wasn’t based any on inside information, but that it wasn’t a complete coincidence, either. SVU has a team of rape counselors, crime survivors, detectives and other law enforcement experts who advise the writers on plot points. “Male-on-male sex crimes was just something that people were telling us was happening,” he said. “The show had never really tackled that issue in a substantial way.”

Confessions" Episode 1003 (NBC Photo: Will Hart)

But the show hasn’t always been an easy sell. When Law & Order: Special Victims Unit premiered in 1999, starring Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay as detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson, it was criticized for sensationalism. There was just no TV precedent for a series that tackled not just the rape or molestation of adults, but also, with disturbing frequency, of children as well. It wasn’t unusual to have a scene in which a small boy or girl was found wandering around the city, dazed, with blood running down his or her legs.

The most brutal episodes violated yet another TV taboo: some of the kids were murdered as well. Longtime viewers of the show may have seen a 15-year-old found in the bushes, a dead baby discovered in a cooler and a 14-year-old war refugee with a slit throat.

Lisa F. Jackson is one of the show’s critics. “SVU portrays a universe of sexual violence that doesn’t really exist,” said Ms. Jackson, director of the HBO documentary Sex Crimes Unit. To make the film, Ms. Jackson spent two years inside the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with the prosecutors of sex crimes.

“SVU shows a universe that people prefer over the reality of rape and sexual violence,” she said. “In real life, most victims don’t show physical signs of assault, and it’s a lot harder to identify victims because they don’t come forward.”

Especially during the final Christopher Meloni years, SVU seemed intent on pumping up ratings with increasingly outlandish crimes and plot twists. Stabler’s own children were kidnapped, a hackneyed plot recycled from 24.

“I think people are remembering stuff from season 10, season 11,” said Mr. Leight carefully, when asked about the more exploitative aspects of the show’s story lines. “I think toward the end of the Meloni era, it got a little ... fetishistic. It was like anything else: you had these great writers on the show for 10 years working with the talented [original showrunner] Neal Baer, and they keep pushing the limits, pushing the limits. When we came in two years ago, our whole idea was to bring the show back to the basics.”

SVU has sailed past its 300th episode, is well into its 14th season, and has survived the loss of one of its two stars. It might be worth considering that there is something in it besides cheap thrills. It’s hard to think of SVU as entertaining. Riveting, perhaps.

Mr. Leight would have us believe that SVU exists as a public service, and that the writers get no pleasure in creating these dark stories, especially if they involve children. Like SVU’s relation to real-life sex crimes, his contention probably has some element of the truth, but isn’t the whole story.

During our interview, Mr. Leight asked us what we thought of the recent accusations that Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, had once been sexually involved with an underage teen.

We said we thought it wouldn’t be too long before an episode about a child-molesting puppeteer would make it onto SVU.

Mr. Leight coughed and was quiet for a moment. “Yeah ... probably not for a while.”

That night, Mr. Leight would write on @warrenleightTV Twitter account, “Memo to: FBI/CIA/NATO/SesameStreet From:SVU Writers’ Room—Please slow it down, we’re having a hard time getting this all down.”

Get ready to go Catfish'in! (MTV)

We're not sure how many of you out there actually saw Catfish, the pseudo/documentary directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost of Paranormal Activity 3 and 4 fame. It was a very hyped film in 2010, especially after it received a Sundance buzz-bump that led to Brett Ratner's company Rogue Pictures acquiring the distribution rights and creating a marketing campaign in the style of The Blair Witch Project, which played up the film's ambiguous placement on the reality spectrum.

Ostensibly, the film began as a chronicle of "Rel's little brother Yaniv ('Nev'), and his relationship with Megan, a girl he met online." It soon devolves into one of those "too unbelievable to be true" (except they say it is) narratives about the perils of trusting the identity of anyone you meet on the internet.

For two years now, MTV has been sitting on the rights of a Catfish TV show starring Nev, which is only now seeing the light of day, premiering tonight. And for an adaptation of a film that hinged so much on the gray area that exists between people's online personas and who they were in "real" life, the TV version seems dedicated to erasing all that ambiguity and revealing--surveillance-style--the identities of these digital Romeos and Juliets. For example, Catfish is currently being used by NYC social startup DateMySchool.com, which vouches for the validity of its members.

From the press release announcing the tenuous link between MTV's Catfish and DateMySchool:

With its advanced privacy settings, and exclusivity to students and alumni, DateMySchool is safer than
any other online social platform worldwide.
DateMySchool is:
• Anonymous: Members may restrict schools, departments, age ranges and individuals from accessing
their profiles, and they cannot be searched on Google.
• Safe: Members are authenticated by their school e-mail addresses and other databases, like Uni-
LDAP and alumni directories, and are given extensive privacy control
• Exclusive: Only verified students and alumni may join.
DateMySchool is the first reversed social network:
• Users see people who they don't know but can trust.
• Users are seen by people who they want to contact and who want to be contacted by them.
• Users discover people online and then meet them offline.
DateMySchool has zero embarrassment:
• Members remain anonymous by restricting their profile-access to people they may see around
campus.
• As a reversed social network, users can be discreet about their reasons for registering.
• Whether for dating, relational or study purposes, DateMySchool is an online platform to discover new
people in a safe way.

But wait, so is the entire thesis of Catfish the show is to be hyper-vigilant and demand transparency of its subjects, when the film itself claimed that it shouldn't have to prove its authenticity/legitimacy? No, that's cool. It won't make for very interesting programming if it just turns into To Catfish a Predator, but we understand how the complexities of the original film might have been a little too much for the network to put on the schedule alongside Awkward.

For those who watched, the fun of first catching young Alana on TLC’s reality series Toddlers and Tiaras was that the then-5-year-old pageant contestant was the ultimate long-shot. Chubby and moon-faced, with a manic energy that was the opposite of her too-perfect opponents’, “Honey Boo Boo Child” was appealing because her confidence seemed so utterly unreasonable, given her humble background and lack of polish. The chasm between Ms. Thompson’s princess dreams and her apparent reality was double-wide, but her childlike, un-Vaselined smile was wider still.

And her fairy tale may be just beginning.

Aided by her fairy godmothers at TLC, Ms. Thompson, now the star of her own show, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, landed higher ratings among the key 18-to-49 demographic than any cable or broadcast network’s coverage of Paul Ryan’s address to the RNC. The third-highest-rated show on the network, it’s become popular enough to get its own Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas specials, as well as to earn a South Park parody (a coveted sign of cultural touchstone-dom). And the family that once subsisted on a chalk miner’s salary is now rolling in it, comparatively speaking: According to TMZ, a recent raise brought their take per episode—of which there will be many more—to between $15,000 and $20,000. And there’ll be many more episodes. Though we need her right now, Ms. Thompson’s show ended its season just over a month ago. “We want to make sure there’s her school,” said the President of TLC and Discovery Networks Eileen O’Neill of her pint-sized star. “We need to make certain we manage audience expectations as series comes back in the spring.”

For those who’ll be jumping into the series then, the Thompson clan lives in rural Georgia. In addition to Alana and her mother, they include dad Mike “Sugar Bear” Thompson, a pet piglet named Glitzy, and three older girls. “Pumpkin is the craziest,” as Alana puts it. “Anna is the pregnantest. And Jessica is my favorite—like my BFF.” The family gathers for a portrait in the credits sequence of each episode, rather like the Kardashians of cable network E!, who brazenly pretended to be famous until they made it. But, skewering any hint of pretension, someone in the family (Mama gets the blame) then passes gas. The Thompsons may be crass, yes. But have you ever even seen a Kardashian sweat? (Outside an unauthorized sex tape, that is?)

In an exhausting era in which the ego reigns supreme for every would-be star (which is, basically, everyone), it’s refreshing to see people so comfortable with themselves. It’s not the class distinction that separates the Thompson family from the rest of us; it’s their self-belief and lack of shame. New York neurotics, hammered by economic uncertainty and lashed by storm waves, have a lot to learn from Mama June and company.

Between Alana’s mugging, her generosity of spirit (Glitzy can be gay “if he wants,” she declared in one episode) and her unorthodox cuisine (heavily caffeinated “Go-Go Juice,” and spaghetti in a ketchup-and-margarine sauce), she’s sui generis. Her catchphrase, “You better redneck-ognize!” could not be more apt.

We do redneck-ognize, Alana. We do.

Since, say, the end of Roseanne, popular television has shown America what it wants to be: the affluent urbanites of NBC’s Must-See lineup from Frasier to Friends, not a one of them worried about making the rent; the doctors and lawyers of an endless parade of hourlong dramas; even the wealthy “Housewives” who migrated from an ABC soap (where they were Desperate) to Bravo unscripted TV (where they were Real) without losing a single spangle off their miniskirts.

You don’t get much more real than Mama June, who was revealed to have once been arrested for contempt of court stemming from a charge regarding an older daughter’s child support. But she’s handled the press revelations with characteristic savoir-faire and minimal rumination, owning up to a past mix-up and moving past it.

While young Alana may not quite realize it—or care—her popularity heralds a welcome validation of a long-term strategic shift for the network she calls home. The onetime “Learning Channel” has, over time, morphed into a window onto the surprisingly bizarre lives of everyday Americans—or maybe onto the surprisingly mundane lives of various cultural outliers. Whatever it is, it’s working.

Not for TLC are those outsized, high-living housewives of Bravo or the garish, entitled Kardashians. Everything about TLC’s various hit series is fundamentally normal—but for one little twist. For instance, the typical suburban mom at the center of the program may have eight kids and is undergoing a divorce, as with Jon and Kate Plus Eight’s Kate Gosselin, the network’s first true breakout star. Or the suburban mom may be a national politician who unwinds by felling the odd caribou, as with Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Or she practices polygamy, as on Sister Wives. Or belongs to a small religious sect (Breaking Amish), or has weddings just a bit more over-the-top than the ones to which we’re accustomed (My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding) or conducts breezy chats with the dead (Long Island Medium).

Whatever their unusual lifestyle situations, what these characters have in common is their wonderful banality. Honey Boo Boo is at once TV’s only utterly normal child (sorry, Modern Family kids, but you’re in the uncanny valley) and its greatest comic creation. Her self-acceptance is practically revolutionary. (At one point she reminds her mother to be sure and spray the tan-in-a-can “under my fat roll.” Lena Dunham couldn’t have said it better.)

After four years of economic stagnation, it’s starting to look like aspiration has lost its sparkle. While the flailing broadcast networks continue to focus on unreasonably wealthy and sophisticated young adults (even CBS’s 2 Broke Girls live in a nice loft), cable has increasingly showcased characters whose financial struggles mirror those of their audiences. Walter White only “breaks bad” and begins cooking and selling meth because he lacks the money to pay his medical bills and support his family. When the once-chic idlers on Downton Abbey face the Great War, they do so in the spirit of shared sacrifice, allowing their dresses to go out of fashion and their house to be overrun with soldiers. The Girls of HBO are all underemployed, and Hannah can’t even count on her parents’ support anymore. And even the surface aesthetic comforts of Mad Men paper over the fact that its central protagonist was born a poor farm boy and faked it till he made it. Dick Whitman became Don Draper; Alana Thompson became Honey Boo Boo. Both have achieved the American dream, but Don Draper’s is flavored with ennui. Maybe he just needs to take a trip due South.

How did we find this angel? Reality TV, at least on TLC, wasn’t always so in tune with the zeitgeist. “The management prior had moved toward a formatted, contrived, celebrity-oriented area,” said said Ms. O’Neill, the TLC/Discovery executive (the corporate siblings are based in Silver Spring, Md.). Jon and Kate were the key to a whole new strategy. In 2008, when the suburban Pennsylvania pair were plucked from TLC’s corporate partner Discovery Health and their show’s title changed from Surviving Sextuplets and Twins, they became personalities and not just medical test cases. When Jon and Kate announced they were separating, the show set the all-time record for TLC programming, with 10.9 million viewers, despite the fact that, sadly, the split wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary for the American family.

The “old TLC” spotlighted home decor, clothing and weddings (some examples, like What Not to Wear and Say Yes to the Dress, endure). But shows like A Baby Story and A Wedding Story, which feature a different cast enacting essentially the same 30-minute narrative on each episode, don’t ring nearly as true as Honey Boo Boo heaving herself down the “redneck slip ’n’ slide” or Theresa Caputo, with her blonde bob and long French-tip nails, delivering a spontaneous psychic reading on a strip-mall sidewalk.

TLC’s programming has not been universally embraced. Some viewers find it exploitative and crass. The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman called Honey Boo Boo “peculiarly reprehensible,” even by the standards of “this country’s most socially irresponsible channel.” Time critic James Poniewozik referred to the series as “fartsploitation,” noting banjo music cues he found insulting, and claimed that an unnamed TLC producer was “shaking his head smugly” at the Thompson family. (He had praise, though, for the wit and charm of Honey Boo Boo herself, and her “Coupon Queen” mother.)

TLC’s general manager Amy Winter dismissed such criticisms. “We’re not mean-spirited in our approach with people on our air and the content we have,” she told The Observer. “There’s a distinction between making fun of people and having fun with people. For the most part, if there’s some sort of comedy or something humorous, the people involved in that realize that there’s something funny in that.”

Maybe it’s the critics who are condescending, then, in refusing to recognize that the series’ subjects are in on the joke.

“The way that we appeal to our audience—we appeal to the type of person who is curious about lives that are unlike theirs,” said Ms. Winter. “They’re open-minded and open-hearted about that. Going into gypsy culture, to a family of polygamists, family from rural Georgia—you have to be intrigued and curious, because there’s something very different about each of the characters. Once you dig in, people do fall in love.”

Sooner or later, they have to. As the deeply perceptive Mama June—who washes her hair in the sink but still thinks she’s looking good—said after an etiquette coach proposed remaking the family into one befitting a future Miss America, “I think that she’s what we call a ‘square,’ and we’re kind of like a lopsided, obtuse, triangle, oval all put together like a, like a deformed shape.”

So too, right now, is the squeezed, stressed-out and now waterlogged TV viewer. Alana isn’t likely to become Miss America. But for a role model with an unshakable belief in her own potential, our down-in-the-dumps electorate could do a lot worse than this kooky 6-year-old.

'Made in Jersey'

CBS has made the first of what will surely be many painful cuts among the major networks--setting free the creative powers, such as they are, behind law procedural Made in Jersey. The legal drama about a sassy Garden State barrister trying to make her way in the big city aired--until now--on Friday nights.  Kyle McLachlan was involved.

It will be replaced by the reality series Undercover Boss.

Bethenny Frankel (Getty Images)

After a pilot period this summer, erstwhile Real Housewife of New York Bethenny Frankel is to get a daily talk show, Bethenny,  in 2013.

Per Deadline, no launch date has been set--it could be as early as January! The show was meant to launch this fall but couldn't get affiliates to book the program, given the crowded market for new talk shows hosted by Katie Couric, Jeff Probst, Ricki Lake, and Steve Harvey among others. But a test run this summer--during which she told celebrity guest Vanessa Williams about her own mother, a sign that Bethenny will likely focus on, well, Bethenny--went well, and perhaps some of the new talk shows will have died off by the time Bethenny's set to launch!