Critic’s Notebook: Reality Shows Reached for Extremes in 2012

The character, Rick Salter, is talking about a wildly successful reality competition show he created in which contestants undergo various kinds of torture: they’re deprived of food one week, branded the next week, and so on. The show becomes a national phenomenon, finding the perverse side of the public taste, until things spin out of control.

Rick, incidentally, is undergoing torture of his own. He spends most of the novel trapped under a gigantic entertainment system in his house, which has toppled, pinning him beneath. We learn about “The King of Pain” as he looks back on the show’s epic rise and fall while waiting for someone to come along and free him from his metaphorically apt prison.

The novel is by Seth Kaufman, a Brooklyn writer whose résumé includes time at TVGuide.com and as a reporter for Page Six at The New York Post. And it seems particularly appropriate for 2012, a year in which the reality genre offered some stunning fare.

There were shows and one-shot specials whose mere titles were jolting: “I Was Impaled,” on Discovery Fit & Health; “Wives With Knives,” on Investigation Discovery; “My Giant Face Tumor,” on TLC. There were series that insulted whole groups of people, like “American Gypsies,” on the National Geographic Channel, and “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding,” on TLC; and “Breaking Amish,” on TLC, and “Amish Mafia,” on Discovery. There was — again on TLC, easily the leader in this type of sludge — “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”

Which should lead us all to do some-soul searching here at year’s end. Was 2012 a nadir for reality TV? Can the offerings possibly get any worse in 2013? Is “The King of Pain” (Sukuma Books), amusing as it is, the last satire that will ever be written about reality television because the genre has become too ludicrous to parody?

Mr. Kaufman, at least, isn’t worried that reality-TV reality is going to make reality-TV fiction unwritable.

“At first glance you might think so, but parody and satire are proving quite flexible these days,” he said in an e-mail interview. “ ‘The Daily Show’ and The Onion make us laugh when we should be furious or heartbroken. So I think reality shows — from the petty, freak-show vérité soap-docs like ‘Real Housewives’ to weirdo-docs of ‘Extreme Couponing’ and ‘I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant’ to ‘enter-pain-ment’ shows like ‘Survivor’ and ‘Killer Karaoke’ — will continue to provide a lot to laugh and wince at.”

And talk about.

“As long as channels can market these shows so they remain in the national conversation at work, on Facebook and in the news, reality TV will continue to be fertile subject matter for anyone interested in modern culture,” Mr. Kaufman said. “And that’s because the questions posed by reality TV are endless. Are we what we watch? Are these shows abusive? Does that make us voyeurs for watching them? Or is it O.K. because, hey, the contestants are exhibitionists?”

And, he noted, “There are many world events that make you think it is reality that is un-parody-able, not just reality TV.”

A scan of the most appalling reality shows of the past year may be cause for dismay, but people who work in the genre note another side to the spectrum.

“I think there’s a lot of redeeming reality television out there,” said Jason Carbone, founder of the production company Good Clean Fun and executive producer of shows like the Style Network’s “Tia & Tamera,” a likable and relatively circumspect show about the adult lives of twins who were stars of the 1990s comedy “Sister, Sister.” “I think that it’s probably not as loud as some of the shows.”

Mr. Carbone suggested that, like every type of television, reality TV has cycles, with current trends perhaps influenced by viewers’ need to forget the economy. “They like to feel better about their own lives,” he said, “and reality TV offers up a lot of people whose lives are far worse than our own.”

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Critic’s Notebook: Amsterdam’s New Stedelijk Museum

On a crowded weekend the narrow, cluttered, glassed-in lobby, roughly where the tub’s drain would be, was badly clogged. The galleries beyond flowed seamlessly into the museum’s old building. The collection looked great.

But entering an oversize plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art is like hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.

Why a tub? That’s the $170 million (well over budget) question. Benthem Crouwel, the Amsterdam firm that designed it, hasn’t explained. At 130,000 square feet, the new Stedelijk (pronounced STEH-duh-lick) gloms onto the rear of the old one, a beloved red-and-white-striped, late-19th-century Neo-Renaissance brick pile by Adriaan Willem Weissman. The new building flips the museum entrance, so that it now faces Museum Plaza, a scruffy greensward around which the Concertgebouw, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum are scattered.

The ambition: update the old building and add exhibition space along with a restaurant and store on the ground floor facing the plaza. There the new Stedelijk, its jutting roof acting as an enormous canopy, is intended to activate the plaza’s northwest corner.

All logical-sounding enough.

But what transpired seems another case of civic icon-envy.

The old Stedelijk pioneered the collecting of modern art and design in postwar Europe. Its white-box interior was widely imitated. The place became a people’s palace for contemporary culture. A wing was added during the 1950s to promote local and experimental art, and to be a host for happenings and cultural protests. It was a very Dutch sort of democratic gesture.

I loved the old Stedelijk when I started visiting it 20-odd years ago. Its grand staircase, creaky herringbone floors, laid-back vibe and modish art mixed quaint and cool. But by then museums like the Pompidou in Paris were already overshadowing it. To get its mojo back the Stedelijk enlisted Robert Venturi, then Álvaro Siza; both of their plans proved unworkable. The project stalled. The Guggenheim opened in Bilbao, Spain, Tate Modern in London.

Benthem Crouwel’s gonzo design suggests a kind of desperation in Amsterdam’s reaction to Bilbao.

That said, this city has been suffering through a decade or more of disruptive and costly infrastructural and other construction, much of it unfinished and shortsighted. People here have been angry and frustrated. So the completion of the new Stedelijk, not long after the arrival of a spectacular new film institute, the Eye, designed by the Austrian architects Delugan Meissl, was greeted generously. The feeling was relief, a reaction notable for a capital previously unaccustomed to new architecture that declines to blend in.

This is fine, even admirable, but it doesn’t mean the bathtub is too. Mel Crouwel, the lead architect for the Stedelijk, was government architect for years. His firm is normally reliable, with an industrial bent. He promoted the tub as a technological novelty, its aerodynamic exterior made of a reinforced synthetic fiber coated in white airplane paint to give the museum a shiny, enameled finish and to nod to the old Stedelijk’s white rooms, which still fails to explain the plumbing metaphor or other moves.

The bathtub floats above the glassed-in ground floor. A few sealed porthole windows, stylish but stingy and soon to look dated, provide glimpses from inside the tub onto the lobby and street. A double-height escalator threads via an enclosed tube from tub to basement, a curious locale for galleries considering the cost and trouble of building below ground in the Netherlands, never mind the feng shui of bunkers for art.

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Times Critics Pick Their Favorite Books of 2012

Each year at this time the daily book critics for The New York Times make lists of favorite books. Favorite is not synonymous with best, so this process can be painful. Brutal honesty is required. We pick what we actually liked, not what we only admired, although ideally our favorites fit both descriptions. But if any of us had fallen for the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, we’d have to say so. We didn’t, so we don’t.

A lot of soul searching goes into these lists. So does a little protocol. Each of us — Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and I — has drawn only from the group of books he or she reviewed. Since none of us reviews work by fellow writers for The Times or by friends, there are necessary and notable omissions. (A glaring one: “The Signal and the Noise” by Nate Silver.) Since the daily editions of The Times can’t review everything, there are omissions by happenstance too.

In the midnight hour these 10 Favorites — not 10 Bests — call for a gut check. Bottom line, for each of us: Is this a book I’d give to a friend? Aside from “The One,” there are three music books I did give to friends and regret not including here. The Leonard Cohen twofer, “I’m Your Man” by Sylvie Simmons and “The Holy or the Broken” by Alan Light, are transfixing for Mr. Cohen’s admirers, this one included. But they are detailed and specific, best suited to devotees. And there wasn’t space for Rod Stewart’s memoir, even though it’s a ton of fun. Michiko Kakutani wound up listing Oliver Sacks’s “Hallucinations” rather than Junot Díaz’s “This Is How You Lose Her.” Dwight Garner chose “Spillover” rather than Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir, “The Last Holiday.”

Anyway, after too much deliberation, we recommend these. Each list is in descending order:

Michiko Kakutani’s 10 Favorite Books of 2012

Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of 2012

Dwight Garner’s 10 Favorite Books of 2012

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