Even though ABC’s new sitcom Happy Endings has a bad name and isn’t particularly clever and gets details about Chicago wrong and is part of that usual trying-to-be-Friends genre, I watched five episodes on Friday, so it can’t be that bad (hint: yes it can).

Reality television is about many things: voyeurism, spectacle, extreme fertility, finding love, losing weight, baking cakes. If the broadcast venue is MTV, it’s about becoming a teen parent.  If the words ‘Competition’ and ‘America’ are in the title of a reality show, crying and/or a B-list celebrity may be involved and eventually, someone will talk about achieving their version of the American dream. 

The group of red, white and blue reality TV includes America’s Next Top Model, America’s Got Talent and American Idol. Each show promotes the notion that the American system makes it possible for every individual to succeed. In these series, if you perform better than your competition (or the public likes you) you win the chance at a better life.

The house is everywhere. Whether it ‘s one of the stock movies about haunted houses or in literature such as Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street, it’s clear that the house has another function that transcends its materiality. The house (or rather, mansion) figures prominently on British television, rather like a never ending royal wedding. As urban theorist Anthony King observed;

“Socially, buildings support relationships, provide shelter, express social divisions, permit hierarchies, house institutions, enable the expression of status and authority, embody property relations; spatially, they establish place, define distance, enclose space, differentiate area;culturally, they store sentiment, symbolize meaning, express identity; politically, they symbolize power, represent authority, become an arena for conflict, or a political resource.” (King, Global Cities. Routledge 1990)

The house is thus never a given, an uncultured or objective setting where the lives of the characters happen to take place. It’s rather a force in itself, at once reflecting and shaping value systems that are inherent to society and that are incarnated in individuals themselves. ITV’s Downton Abbey is a perfect case in point, as even the title of the series indicates the importance that the house will come to assume; Downton Abbey is the estate of the Crawley family, inhabited by them and their small army of servants.

One of the more interesting ontological discussions of late centres around the Simulation Theory. This holds that, given the current rate of technological expansion – specifically, advances in computer animation and modeling—it’s reasonable to assume current humanity is in fact but a simulation being run by a highly advanced future version of ourselves.

There are many obvious issues with this type of assumption re: what happens when humanity gets access to technological wonders, not the least being the existence of iBeer. Even if you postulate an awkward phase future mankind will have outgrown, just why our most potent, wise and reverend descendants would then want to devote enormous amounts of time and resource to re-enabling Internet forums is unclear.

Glenn Beck has certainly picked some odd fights in his day.

While the Fox News anchor has made targets out of the likes of Van Jones and George Soros to much media commotion, sometimes he does the exact opposite, instead responding to criticism by only criticizing back, whether it be responding to Rep. Anthony Weiner’s allegations of Beck supporting Goldline’s shady business practices by establishing the juvenile WeinerFacts.com or calling Avatar a “Smurf-murdering” movie following James Cameron’s criticisms against him (these latter two attempts are not considered his most successful).