Even more than the reality shows on other networks, the ones on VH1 appear to be saying, “My, aren’t blond bimbos and undereducated minority people amusing?” No one has ever been able to tell me what he or she liked about these shows, beyond laughing at the people in them, In an interview in the New York Observer a couple of years ago, [Michael] Hirschorn, [who was VH1’s head of programming from 2001 to 2008 and] who went to Harvard and has a master’s degree in comparative literature form Columbia, was for a time the editor of the music magazine Spin, and writes about culture for The Atlantic, said that he grew up in a self-consciously culture home where the only TV he was allowed to watch was Jacques Cousteau and “Masterpiece Theater.” Like Scarlett O;Hara, filled with life-affirming resolve at the end of the Civil War, he rose up from teh poverty of middle-class standards, stared at the ratings numbers twinkling in the heavens, shouted, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be tasteful again!,” and set fire to his parents’ beige public-television tote bag.
The zealotry of the converted is well-documented. We’re all familiar with “selling out.” But the detail that caught my eye is Hirschorn’s academic background.
In the last three years, I’ve met more than a few people in marketing with advanced degrees in the humanities. Which makes me wonder if the disciplines now lumped together as “critical studies” aren’t vocational training for an information economy. That is, when they are drained of irony. Or drowned in it.
(And I’m also guilty as charged.)