How can you tell your TV critic holds a Ph.D in English from Harvard? She more or less tells you:

While scripted television is preoccupied with 20th-century forms like the detective story and the psychosexual bildungsroman (exceptions include "The Mountain" and "The Sopranos"), reality television has built up an impressive anthology of 19th-century melodramas of love, money and the middle class.


Come on, Virginia. It's TV! It's just pretty lights blinking inside a glass box. And it's supposed to fun, not like broccoli!

See also: Marriage Is Seldom Simple, With the Relatives Clawing and Doubts Gnawing.
One Aging Rich Guy, 10 Heirs, and All Sorts of Plastic Surgery [NYT]
So What Do You Do, Virginia Heffernan? [mediabistro]