Review: What We Do in the Shadows, "Go Flip Yourself" | Season 4, Episode 8
Is this week’s home renovation show parody a flip… or a flub?
I spend way too much time thinking about reality TV, given that I hardly ever watch it. I’m a fan of some of the long-running competition series — Survivor, The Amazing Race and Top Chef especially— and I’ve been known to binge a survival adventure like Alone or to kill a couple of idle hours on an airplane or in a hotel room watching multiple house-hunting episodes in a row. But I don’t really care about the housewives, the bachelors, the dance moms, or the exhibitionist celebrity families… outside of a general fascination with how their shows are fiendishly constructed to keep audiences hooked.
I am though incredibly intrigued by something uncommonly common to reality TV: the idea that real people and the places where they live and work can be featured on television every week for years, and yet we can still know almost nothing verifiable about them. For example: Who are the Chrisleys, really? (This is something federal law enforcement would also like to know.)
This week’s Wh…