Reality Television Quotes

“Real love involves a foundation of respect, honesty, and trust, concepts wholly missing from the pale imitations hawked to us by the folks who script 'unscripted' entertainment.”
― Jennifer L. Pozner, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV

“New Rule: People on reality shows have to quit saying, "You either love me or you hate me." There's actually a third option: not giving a shit about you.”
― Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass

“For how many generations now had his people been turning their backs on things? How long had they sat in their living rooms and watched other people die?”
― Clare B. Dunkle, The Sky Inside

“So you're a fellow mercenary, then."

"Does this mean you'll afford me some professional courtesy?"

"Don't ask for that. All it means is that you might get to face the person who kills you. . . But only if it's convenient.”
― Howard Tayler, Emperor Pius Dei

“At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx. Min and Jade are feeding their babies while watching How My Child Died Violently. Min's my sister. Jade's our cousin. How My Child Died Violently is hosted by Matt Merton, a six-foot-five blond who's always giving the parents shoulder rubs and telling them they've been sainted by pain. Today's show features a ten-year-old who killed a five-year-old for refusing to join his gang. The ten-year-old strangled the five-year-old with a jump rope, filled his mouth with baseball cards, then locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn't come out until his parents agreed to take him to FunTimeZone, where he confessed, then dove screaming into a mesh cage full of plastic balls. The audience is shrieking threats at the parents of the killer while the parents of the victim urge restraint and forgiveness to such an extent that finally the audience starts shrieking threats at them too. Then it's a commercial.”
― George Saunders, Pastoralia

“I tell ya! The road to success is an endless battle for you and me.”
― Steven Jackson , Numbers... a Gangsta's Child: A Woman's Journey from Rags to Riches

“Matt Merton comes back and explains that last week's show on suicide, in which the parents watched a reenactment of their son's suicide, was a healing process for the parents, then shows a video of the parents admitting it was a healing process. ("Sea Oak")”
― George Saunders, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher. ("Sea Oak")”
― George Saunders, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“I call it guerilla TV.”
― Marsha Bemko Producer of Antiques Roadshow

“All these novels in which the authors try desperately to dramatize their own histories, their experiences, to recount their own psychological dramas - this is not literature. It is secretion, just like bile, sweat or tears - and, sometimes even, excretion. It is the literary transcription of 'reality television'. It is all the product of a vulgar unconscious not unlike a small intestine, around which roam the phantasms and affects of those who, now they've been persuaded they have an inner life, don't know what to do with it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Unfortunately, chivalry gets you nowhere in reality television.”
― Lianne Oelke, Nice Try, Jane Sinner