Comeuppance

Let's say you used to work with someone who...let's just say someone who isn't very nice. And then let's say that one day you were flipping through an entertainment magazine and found out that this person had been cast on a popular reality TV show. Do you put aside your personal feelings and cheer for them out of the perverse pride that comes with knowing someone on TV, or do you hope that the show exposes their faults to the world?

This seems like an uncommon situation, right up there with the moment in the football game when the referee studies the rulebook and says "Ain't nothin' in the book says a mule can't kick a field goal." But it's happened to me twice in the past year. Reality TV has made this extreme sort of schadenfreude possible on a scale that wasn't possible before—previously, you had to know someone who was a politician, a celebrity, an athlete or a game-show contestant if you were to have any hope of seeing them get their ass handed to them on national television.

I used to be reflexively anti-reality TV, but this democratization of nationally televised dope-slapping is, I think, a positive development for the culture.