Reality TV is eating itself with the return of Jersey Shore and Trading Spaces

The New York Times

The return of Trading Spaces on Saturday and Jersey Shore tonight with a Family Vacation season will test whether two relics of a more naive time in reality television can hold up, says Jon Caramanica. "The reality television of the 2000s was a proving ground and a wide-open playing field, a thing you could graduate from to do better things, emotionally or professionally," he says. "Those stars — of the docudrama hall-of-fame series Jersey Shore and the standard-setting home renovation show Trading Spaces — arrived as neophytes and left as savvy instacelebs, beneficiaries of the early wave of reality king- and queen-making. But as the end of the 2010s approaches, reality TV has become an ouroboros, so self-referential and saturated that opportunities for advancement — or growth, or shock — have winnowed. It has become its own career path, and its innovations are slowing."

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