Massive cultural phenoms I have totally missed out on.
Sometimes I think getting older is a process of caring less and less about more and more. Eventually you dont give a shit about anything beyond your own, tiny personal bubble.
That sounds terrible because it is. It’s also the process underlying the entire Murdoch business model. So I should be actively hostile to it.
Then I read pars like this in New York magazine and I realise there are some epic, culture spanning post modern cultural phenomena, like the Real Housewives Cinematic Universe, that I will go to my grave, happy to have missed.
Historically, the seating arrangement at a Real Housewives reunion is representative of a group’s division throughout the previous season. Enemies are normally sat across from one another, friends and allies share a couch, and those most entrenched in drama earn the hot seat next to our circus ringleader, Andy Cohen. But things aren’t always quite so neat. Sometimes dynamics evolve so quickly throughout a season (or even the reunion itself) that a seating chart that works for one conversation may make no sense for the next. At the season-four Real Housewives of New Jersey reunion, for example, Teresa Giudice switched couches halfway through to more effectively yell at those who she’d been seated beside. Sometimes the spot next to Andy goes to an O.G. such as the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Kyle Richards (who’s sat there all but twice), whose gravitas would feel misplaced further down the couch but might not have been in the thick of the most drama. And rarely — like when Danielle Staub was given a stand-alone chair for her season-ten RHONJ reunion appearance — the entire cast is united against one person.
It's a running joke in the Good Omens fandom that reality television was one of the demon Crowley's contributions to humanity on behalf of Hell, and it's moments like this that confirms this as canon 😳
the more we age the more we cant keep track just because there is so much out there. But totally with you on this one with real housewives. Don't get it, don't care. In the old days i think it was easier - not as much choice, smaller avenues to experience these things. Now its "did you see . . . " "nah, i dont have that streaming service". And it becomes increasingly hard to bond over stuff as it happens because people are stuck in increasingly smaller populated chunks. I get and give heaps of recommendations from/to my mates and friends. But its rare that we are watching the same thing at the same time.