Sure enough, the woman who was Mrs. Kris Humphries for 72 days swiftly banged out a reasonably articulate response Monday, tweeting that "I respect Jon and I am a firm believer that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that not everyone takes the same path in life. We're all working hard and we all have to respect one another. Calling someone who runs their own businesses, is a part of a successful TV show, produces, writes, designs, and creates, 'stupid,' is in my opinion careless." She then promptly tweeted four pouty photographs of herself as she publicly mused how blond she ought to go. And ... the prosecution rests, America.

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Would you say, "God is trying to tell you something; maybe you should listen." Would you ponder, "It probably just fell out… ick." Would you, when you heard that the family had named the baby and were grieving for it, say, "I feel sorry for their kids, not her. She did this to herself."  You likely wouldn't, because I'm guessing you're not some heartless troll. But what if the couple in question were Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar? The family announced this week that "We discovered during a routine 19-week ultrasound that our 20th child, who was due in April 2012, passed away recently." Oh! Then have at it, Internet!

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OK, it's not quite that simple. In surprising-to-no-one news this week, a new study from as reliable source as the Girl Scout Research Institute found plenty to confirm all your worst fears about girls who define themselves as "regular" reality watchers. After surveying 1,100 girls aged between 11 and 17 nationwide, the Girl Scouts found that compared with their non-reality TV watching peers, reality fans are likelier to agree that gossiping is a normal part of girls' relationships (78 percent vs. 54 percent), that girls are naturally "catty" with each other (68 percent vs. 50 percent) and that it's "hard to trust" girls (63 percent vs. 50 percent).

Regular reality-TV viewers also report spending a significantly larger amount of time on their appearance and are far likelier to agree with statements like "Being mean earns you more respect than being nice." Apparently, reality fans don't join the Girl Scouts to make friends; they join to win.

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Bravo's unscripted series offers that horror movie gimmick of showing you unlikable people doing ill-advised things that you can't prevent no matter how loudly you yell or curse at the screen. But because the characters are -- in the physical sense, at least -- "real," and the world-shattering plot twist at the core of this season was telegraphed to the audience long in advance, what might otherwise seem a guilty pleasure seems instead a travesty, as depraved a spectacle as anything that has ever appeared on American screens.

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The spectacularly fecund Duggars entered the reality game already way ahead of the Gosselins, and even left Octomom Nadya Suleman in the dust. They've been a source of weird fascination ever since they welcomed their 15th child on their first television special seven years -- and five pregnancies -- ago. And each time their brood increases, so does the public scorn. Along with occasional good wishes, commenters on the L.A. Times website have been writing things like: "How about you bolt your knees together?" and "Lady, your hooha isn't a clown car!"

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From the start, the whirlwind romance of the reality star and the basketball beefcake seemed to be moving at a reality television-assisted pace. The two met just a year ago, but by May, Kim was flashing a $2 million diamond roughly the size of the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs. What followed was a painstakingly chronicled and dizzyingly brief engagement. Remember July? They seemed so happy then! Remember when she said she was going to be Kim Humphries henceforth? Remember the August wedding so opulent, it made Kate Middleton's look like a lunchtime exchange of vows at City Hall? E! aired the now bitterly ironic "Kim's Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event" just three weeks ago.

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Tonya Cooley is a former "Real World Chicago" and "Real World/Road Rules Challenge" cast member. She's been a Playboy "Cybergirl of the Week," has worked with the Girls Gone Wild team, and done a little Cinemax softcore. And absolutely none of that means that she wasn't raped.

Two years after filming her "Real World/Road Rules" season, Cooley has filed suit against MTV, Bunim/Murray Productions, and her former castmates Kenneth Santucci and Evan Starkman, claming that Santucci and Starkman sexually abused her while the show's producers did nothing to intervene. Instead, she alleges, they just kept the cameras rolling. She says her castmates "took another male participant's toothbrush and rubbed the toothbrush around plaintiff's genitals, including rubbing her labia and inserting the toothbrush into plaintiff's vagina." She further alleges that male cast members were goaded to "inappropriately touch female cast members' bodies, including in intimate areas." MTV and "The Real World" and the "Challenge" producers Bunim/Murray have so far not commented on the case.

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Stanger revved up last week by telling the hosts of "New York Live" that our metropolitan women "are smart in business and dumb in love," whereas Los Angeles women are "dumb in business and smart in love." She then added, in a coup de grace that makes asses of both sexes, that "[Men] like [smart women] after marriage. They don't like them before they are married. You got to dumb it down a little because men are not that bright." To recap: Women are dumb and men are dumb, just in different ways.

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For six years now, the Gosselin family has been part of the television landscape -- first via a series of Discovery specials, then through the often tumultuous, Ed Hardy-festooned "Jon & Kate Plus Eight" years, and then, finally, in the shark-jumping post-divorce era of Kate's solo parenting. For the past two years, the show has limped along; like "Laverne & Shirley" after Shirley skipped town, however, the magic was gone. More significantly, just as the Gosselins have grown and changed with time, America is likewise no longer the big brood and multiple births-obsessed land it was back in the mid-2000s. Now, if you're not a hoarder or a freaky eater, good luck getting -- or staying -- on TV.

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The winner gets a plastic suitcase containing 4,000 euros ($5,680) to take with them when they are expelled.

All five have already had their asylum requests rejected, and face an uncertain future when they are deported to countries they barely remember.

Broadcast across the nation last Thursday, the show may sound like a scene from a surreal black comedy, but "Weg van Nederlands" (it can translate as either "Away from the Netherlands" or "Crazy about the Netherlands") was for real.

The contestants are students who fled their homelands as children and grew up in the Netherlands. Now, though, their adopted nation has tightened its asylum policies, and their time is up.

With its ever-smiling presenter, flanked by a pair of gyrating blondes in sexed-up police uniforms with mini-skirts and plunging necklines, the show makes disturbing viewing.

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Just kidding. They barely talked about it at all. Seriously, what did you expect?

The episode started with the housewives convening at the home of cast members Paul and Adrienne Maloof. "I don't think any of us saw any sign of this [coming], and that's why it's such a shock," Adrienne Maloof said to the group, which conspicuously did not include Russell Armstrong's widow, Taylor. "We don't know what state of mind a person's in to get to that point," said Kyle Richards.

The sequence was brief and muted, no doubt because the discussion was, too; given reality TV's tendency to tease out and highlight every tiny glimmer of emotion as if it were a frame from the Zapruder film, it seems inconceivable that a lot of big moments got cut out.

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National Public Radio blogger Linda Holmes published a thoughtful piece yesterday proposing a code of ethics that would govern the production of so-called reality TV series. It's sensible and humane. And in a universe where sensible, humane people produced shows like "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" -- which lost stressed-out cast member Russell Armstrong to suicide last month -- it would be adopted industry-wide in a heartbeat.

"It would be more expensive [to implement such a code] and it would close a few doors," Holmes writes, "and yes, some potential for exploitation drama would be sacrificed. But it would also prevent the baby of a perfectly good game show or documentary show from being thrown out with the bathwater of 'The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.'"

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Critics carp that by the time reality TV finally finds its way to TV, it’s been scrubbed clean of most of its reality. “Pitch” attempts to reverse all that. It’s a single-camera show that brings viewers inside the pitch meetings for other reality shows. Watch as up-and-coming and/or washed-up celebrities make the case that their lives deserve to be on television. Marvel as executives spin out possible plot scenarios for allegedly unscripted shows. Wince as network veterans who were involved in quality sitcoms (and, in some cases, educational television) look queasy as independent production companies try to convince them of the merits of a half-hour show about Selena Gomez’s driver. If “Pitch” succeeds, there is a spin-off already prepared: “Pitch Pitch,” which examines the process that led to the airing of “Pitch.”

“¬Oprah”

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"Wow. That's great," said one.

"Yeah, where'd you get that?" asked another.

"You'll never believe it," I told them. "This is school lunch."

Times have changed since celebrity chef Jamie Oliver broadcast startling and deliberately inflammatory—this was reality TV, after all— images of kids here dumping trays of fresh food untouched into the trash. For those of you who missed, Oliver's prime-time program, "Food Revolution," the British chef arrived in Huntington in 2009 after it was named the most unhealthy metropolitan area in America and went to work ousting greasy burgers and pizza in favor of from-scratch meals made with fresh ingredients. Two years later, on the first week of school, which began in mid-August, students in Cabell County sat down to meals of from-scratch chicken quesadillas and brown rice and, on the day I visited, creamy chicken and noodles served with freshly made coleslaw, steamed broccoli with parmesan, an orange and hot rolls, the smell of which floated enticingly through the halls.

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Sure enough, the cast and crew of "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" convened yesterday to tape a special reacting to the death of series regular Russell Armstrong, wife of series regular Taylor Armstrong, who killed himself earlier this month.

The Los Angeles Times broke the story yesterday, quoting "sources close to production."

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The type of so-called reality show represented by the "Real Housewives" franchise is the soft-bellied, 21st century American TV version of a gladiatorial contest. It has no agenda except giving viewers the basest sort of entertainment: the spectacle of people doing violence to each other and suffering violence themselves. Instead of going at each other like gladiators with swords and clubs, or like boxers hurling punches, participants in this kind of unscripted show attack each other psychologically. The show's appeal is the spectacle of emotional violence. The participants -- or "cast members," as they are revealingly labeled -- suffer and bleed emotionally while we watch and guffaw.

It's time to get real about reality TV.  As your parents may have warned you, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. People are getting hurt.

Armstrong, the estranged husband of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" star Taylor Armstrong, commited suicide on Monday. Friends have said the show changed him, that the pressure of having his marital strains examined on national TV and the financial stress of keeping up with much wealthier cast members all contributed to his emotional collapse.

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In the Los Angeles Times this morning, Armstrong's friend William Ratner said that the show "was [Russell's] downfall. The TV show put a lot of pressure on him to produce financially. You're on a show with a couple like the Maloofs, who are verifiable billionaires, and you're not," said William Ratner. ("Housewife" Adrienne Maloof's family owns the Sacramento Kings and the Palms casino in Las Vegas.)

Armstrong's lawyer, Ronald Richards, speaking to ABC, noted that: "These couples join these shows, and then they keep trying to outdo each other and they end up spending all their money trying to sustain a lifestyle that's unrealistic and wasn't there prior to the show," said Richards. "The weekly social events, the dinners and all the BS, trying to pretend you have unlimited resources in Beverly Hills is tough."

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2. Brain-dead zombie film of the day: "World War Z" is a great book about the oral history of the zombie invasions, but it looks like the film adaptation is just going to be a vehicle for Brad Pitt to act like Jason Bourne (if Bourne fought zombies). Now we know why Ed Harris and Matthew Fox dropped out.

3. Foreign exchange program of the day: Tara Reid and Pam Anderson will be going to London for "Celebrity Big Brother." That actually works out quite well for us, as long as you don't send over that Barbie Mom or Duchess Fergie in return.

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1. Jesse Eisenberg in Dostoyevsky adaptation: It sounds crazy, but making "The Double" into a movie might actually be a good idea. Very Charlie Kaufmanesque. Maybe Michael Cera can play his doppleganger?

2. Connor Ratliff is old enough to be president: Well, I'm sold on this guy's campaign. If only the rest of politics were this easy.

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There's only one problem: a former MTV reality star* has already claimed the name Johnny Bananas, and he's gearing up to sue "Entourage" for using his likeness for their imaginary monkey show. Does he have grounds to take this all the way to monkey court? Let's take a look.

Johnny Bananas, aka John Devenanzio, starred in "The Real World" in 2006 (and later on "The Challenge," formerly known as "Road Rules/Real World Challenge") and talks with a thick Brooklyn/Boston accent, just like Drama and Dice.

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