Paul Johnson wrote:

There are a ton of grammatical errors and misspellings throughout this article;

Yes, that’s how I trick people to post comments here. If everything was spelled correctly all the internet grammar Nazis would move somewhere else.

Paul Johnson wrote:

it looks completely unedited

That’s because it is. I mean, who the hell would edit it for me? I post these sort of things 4 times a week. You are lucky if I proofread them once. :P

Paul Johnson wrote:

And who wrote it? It’s unsigned.

OMG! Anonymous article on the internet? No way! It cannot be!

Actually, if you just looked in the sidebar you would see a nice link to an About me page which explains in quite a bit of detail who writes the inane, incoherent, badly spelled and grammatically incorrect articles here. But

There are a ton of grammatical errors and misspellings throughout this article; it looks completely unedited. And who wrote it? It’s unsigned.

Ghost Hunters and Dirty Jobs, Myth Busters and etc are documentaries of sorts in my book. Axe Men, Ice Road Truckers and Pawn Shop Stars are reality shows.

Here is how I usually tell the difference:

Documentaries have hosts while reality shows have characters. Each episode of a documentary has a topic and a script. You can simply ask what was the episode about and you can answer with something succinct like “Mike Rowe learns to shovel pig shit, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage build a bomb out of chewing gum and the Ghost Hunter team spends the night in a haunted castle.” There is an idea behind each episode. Reality shows usually don’t have that – you just film your characters until they do something interesting. Sometimes you will get lucky and you can get lucky and end up building an episode around some single important event. Most of the time though, you end up stitching your episodes together from unrelated little events.

Also, you will never see hosts argue, fight, throw a hissy fit, get angry and slam the door, rant to the camera how everyone he works with is an incompetent asshole or spectacularly quit their job on the air. Reality shows on the other hand thrive on that type of stuff.

What is the extent of a reality show to you though?

Is Ghost Hunters a reality show, or a documentary?

How about dirty jobs?

I mean there are tons of shows that are entertaining and based in reality… but are not your “voted off the island” type crap.

@ Zel:

Yes, I must say that I did. I was concerned that the baby thing will be a little bit to much. But it turned out to actually add to the tension. Dexter was increasingly more sloppy due to lack of sleep. Several times Rita calls him mid-kill because there is a baby related emergency. Had to take unnecessary risks making him question whether the whole family thing is even worth it.

Then he actually becomes friendly with the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow) who also happens to be a family man. A best adjusted serial killer he has ever met. So we had Dexter trying learn how to be a father from him. Unfortunately he gets to close.

Btw, at least one of the supporting character relationships turns out to be a calculated sham.

The Season 4 finale though is a complete mind fuck. I watched it with some friends and we sat there for like 5 minutes in silence just watching the credits with our mouths open. Joss Whedon would be proud. I can’t wait for Season 5 to see how the event from the final affects all the characters.

I also liked Dead Like Me, too bad the show didn’t get the attention it deserved.

You enjoyed Dexter s4 ? I gave up on it after the first episode : 1 topless scene, 1 or 2 sex scenes, relationship subplots for every single cast member, increasingly obvious Apple product placement, the whole baby thing in a serial killer show… Maybe it gets better in the later episodes, but it took a very wrong start.

Think I might have seen this once or twice… just caught it while channel flicking, back in the days when I flicked channels ever. (The mode of TV watching you described, same here except with the “turn on TV” part replaced with downloading from the internet then waiting for good time to catch up on the shows I like.

I would go check it out properly, but I already have a fair bit of stuff in the ‘to-watch’ queue.

@ ths:

Heh… I didn’t initially make that connection, but yeah. It is a little bit like that.

Actually reapers are organized in departments – the main cast is from the “External Influence” department which covers random accidents, murders, poisoning, overdose and all that type of stuff. Other departments are rarely mentioned but they do show up from time to time – for example the Plague department which only gets busy few times a year, or the Natural Causes department which basically has reapers working as aides, nurses and doctors in hospitals and old-folks homes.

There is also a little kid who sometimes shows up to reap a soul of a pet. They never explained whether or not wild animals also have reapers – it is sort of implied (but never spelled out explicitly) that pets get reaped so that they can rejoin their human families in the afterlife.

sounds a bit like DEATH from Terry Pratchett’s discworld universe.
the character has the same job: welcoming people’s souls to the afterlife.
funnily the character DEATH consists of a lot of smaller death personifications for every lifeform. Terry seems to appreciate the death of rats especially, this occurs quite often in stories, most often when mouse traps are involved ;).

happy new year from germany!