But she really got rolling on Sunday’s “Watch What Happens Live,” telling a caller who’d asked about long-distance relationships that “in the gay world, it will always be open.… There is no curbing the gay man.” She then told the show’s openly gay host Andy Cohen, “I have tried to curb you people.” And when Cohen told her, “I am a gay and am down for the monogamy,” Stanger snorted derisively and replied, “When was the last time you had a boyfriend?” She also told another caller, “You’re very handsome. I thought you were straight… because [you're] not queeny. Like, do you want a queen? Yeah, I don’t think so.”

When not exhausting all her disparaging stereotypes regarding “the gays,” Stanger, who is Jewish, also informed America that “Jewish men lie,” prompting Cohen to remark, “So I’m a non-monogamous liar.”

Stanger did not gain her renown for her subtlety. Her persona is about the tough love — heavy on easily digestible generalizations, not exactly brimming with scientific fact. So she likely was aiming for a certain jokey, keepin’ it real tone. Her comments about gays and Jews, after all, came within an episode in which she also declared, “If you give a good blowjob, the man falls in love with you forever.” Which is only true if you define “forever” as “10 seconds.”

The fantasy that there’s a quick secret to figuring out love is exactly what won Stanger a television show in the first place. It’s not as if anyone’s watching Bravo, the home of “Real Housewives,” for the nuance. It’s simpler to have someone confidently spout that gay men are slutty and Jews are dishonest. And just remember that when you’re out there dating, okay? It’ll streamline the whole process!

Yet not everyone enjoys being reduced to a single insulting stereotype. After the episode aired, the hashtag #CancelStanger promptly gained Twitter steam, and Bravo’s PR team had to issue a damage-control statement that Stanger’s comments “are not representative of the network’s beliefs and opinions. We apologize for the offense it caused.”

Stanger, for her part, has spent most of the past few days steadfastly clueless. On Monday she was still tweeting “It’s true LA gays toughest nuts to crack to monogamy!” Then, perhaps considering that she might this time alienated more people than usual, she added, “Attn male Gays: I support you … my comment on WWHL was to a LA guy who can’t find commitment,” and “So sorry — didn’t mean to offend anyone. Love you all. X0″ She also sent a statement to GLAAD that read “I am so sorry. I did not mean to offend anyone with my comments last night on ‘Watch What Happens Live.’”

It would be foolhardy to suggest that the dynamics of hetero, gay and lesbian relations are identical. But that doesn’t mean they can be boiled down to offensive soundbites about dumbness or promiscuity, especially coming from the clumsy mouth of a woman who seems to possess no true wit or empathy. Kathy Griffin makes cracks about “the gays” all the time too, but she’s not pretending she can help you get married. And it’s Stanger’s abrupt, dismissive tone, her determination to hate on everybody, that goes to the core of the real problem with her. Love is a crazy thing. An often foolish enterprise. Maybe it’s not monogamous and maybe it’s not forever. Yet most of us, gay, straight and in between, seem to want it anyway. So why would anybody take advice on matters of the heart from someone who seems like she might not possess one?

That’s why anyone not named Kate Gosselin was unsurprised last week when TLC announced it would not be renewing her family’s reality show. But Gosselin, whose skill set apparently doesn’t include reading the writing on the wall, tells People that her children “weren’t ready” for the cancellation. “Nobody was,” she added. “I’ve never quit a job in my life without having something else lined up. I don’t know what’s next.” Uh, maybe getting a job?

Kate, a registered nurse, is not the same regular gal with the weird haircut who first provoked America’s weird fascination. And while she may well land on her feet with a correspondent spot on a morning talk show or slugging it out with Andy Dick on some D-list competition series, the sobering truth is that her days at the star of her own television show are in the rearview mirror. She’s not an actress or a talk-show host who can simply bounce to another similar job. She’s not a Kardashian or Real Housewife with oodles of family money to fall back on. She’s not even like some of reality TV’s younger, glossier casualties like Lauren Conrad, with an aspirational image that can for a time be leveraged into a quasi-career as a “fashion designer” or “novelist.” Note to all would-be reality stars out there — there was a time when the word “Trishelle” meant something too.

It’s certainly not going to be an easy road back from television stardom and the New York Times best-seller list to working stiff shlubdom. Gosselin’s ex-husband Jon, who not so long ago was wincing from the cover of every magazine at your supermarket checkout, has more recently been installing solar panels in Pennsylvania. Raising eight children in this appalling economy does sound like a potentially devastating hardship. And before you bust out the old “Then she shouldn’t have had those kids” line, too late, she did. They are still eight human beings who need to be fed and clothed and have health insurance. As Gosselin says, “I told them I will work my fingers to the bone to make sure that they can stay here and go to their school. There are no guarantees in life for anyone, but they know that I’m giving it my best shot.”

Yet despite her concerns for her children, one has to question the wisdom of Gosselin appearing on the cover of People magazine to express anxiety about the future after living so comfortably and for so long on her network’s swag and perks — including a reported healthy $250,000 an episode. And sure, the issue is timed to the final episode of “Kate Plus Eight,” airing Monday, but isn’t there something else to remember this week that might make the angst of a reality star seem trivial? Or, as one of the several hundred commenters already weighing in on People.com succinctly put it, “Boo hoo hoo.”

She’s been a health-care worker and now she’s a full-time mother, but Gosselin is a lady whose main job of late has been irritating people and making them feel better about themselves in comparison. That’s why people watch her. And over the several televised seasons she has — either cannily or tragically, depending on how you view these things — evolved into a personality who knows how to give the people exactly what they want. This, after all, is the woman who managed to drive her sitter to quit over a pizza-related meltdown on Monday’s episode  — and exasperated Anderson Cooper in the process. Being the woman America loves to hate is what Kate Gosselin has spent the last several years doing. And based on her quotes to People, that’s the career she wants to hang on to.

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.

Contestants are invited to “come on down” in traditional gameshow fashion, and are introduced by a peppy, off-screen announcer. Viewers are told, for example, that 18-year-old Gulistan is from Armenia and her brother was murdered. She’s lived in the Netherlands for 11 years, wants to be a lawyer and loves syrup waffles.

Dutch viewers watching at home were able to participate in the quiz by answering the questions online. Their top prize was a vacation on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and the presenter joked that, unlike the asylum seekers, they’d get a return ticket.

Although the show’s deliberate bad taste has provoked outrage, supporters, who include refugee rights groups, say the shock tactics are an effective way of raising public awareness and provoking debate on the issue.

“Of course it’s terrible, but it is also very smart,” said Janneke Bruil, from the Foundation for Refugee Students, which helped find contestants for the show.

“When you watch this show it hits you right into your heart. You can’t help but think that something is wrong. It’s a game, but at the same time these people are going to be sent off on a plane, and it’s their life. You have to ask ‘what is going on here?’”

The Netherlands long had a tradition of welcoming refugees, but in recent years there has been a surge of support for political parties opposed to immigration amid concern that the number of foreigners living in the country is undermining Dutch culture. The anti-Islamic Party of Freedom scored 15.5 percent in last year’s general election, making it the third-largest group in Parliament, and the center-right government is dependent on its support. Asylum policies have been tightened.

“They don’t see us like human, animals have more rights than asylum seekers,” said Blessing, 24, one of the contestants on last week’s show. Full names of the participants were not released for privacy reasons.

“They just see us a bunch of thieves and liars, but they need to start seeing us as individuals. Look at the people on the program; we have so much to contribute,” she insisted. “We are not just eating, sleeping and waiting for the government to do things for us, we are hard-working people, we’ve proven to them that we are integrated into the system and we are ready to contribute and to give back.”

Blessing fled Cameroon when she was 15 and is now about to complete her Aviation Engineering degree at the Hogeschool Amsterdam University, but has had her residency revoked and risks deportation. She defends the show’s unconventional approach.

“There have been so many serious shows about this subject, so many very sad interviews,” she told GlobalPost in a telephone interview. “It’s a serious issue, but by treating it in a funny way we can do something different from what people are already used to and get more attention. We wanted to show that we are not pathetic people, we are just normal, that’s why we took a fun approach.”

Competing against rivals from Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Syria and Armenia, Blessing was the first contestant eliminated from the show due to her inability to carve cheese or answer questions like: how many bicycles were stolen in the Netherlands during 2010? (The answer: 524,000). As a consolation prize, she was given a bulletproof vest decorated in the style of traditional Delft blue tiles.

Gulistan from Armenia was the eventual winner of the 4,000-euro prize.

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.

After that came a brief on-screen title noting that this week’s events were filmed before the suicide. From then on, it was business as usual: Kyle and her husband, Mauricio, moving into a bigger house (because God knows the one they’re in isn’t big enough); Adrienne throwing a viewing party to celebrate Camille’s cameo on the now-defunct “$#*! My Dad Says”; the weird rivalry between the Maloofs and the Vanderpumps over their dogs (the Maloofs have a new puppy, Jackpot, which at one point gets dressed up in what looks like tiny bondage gear).

There were no pictures of Russell Armstrong on the show, nor did the producers cut to footage of him at any point.

“Life goes on,” Kyle said in the opening scene. “It has to.”

But the show’s cursory treatment of such a huge event — an event that disrupted the illusion of a present-tense narrative, became an international news story and was lurking right at the front of every viewer’s consciousness during the premiere — seems, well, rather odd.

I’m not talking about the reaction of the cast members as they convened to discuss a shocking development on camera; the housewives, their spouses and their friends are the richest of the rich, very much inclined to keep up appearances, and their tamped-down reactions were consistent with that. I’m talking about the reaction of the series itself, which was almost nonexistent.

Over 10 years ago, “Survivor” contestant Michael Skupin burned his hands in a campfire so badly that he had to be airlifted out of the game. The incident was a disproportionately huge news story — “Survivor” was a very big deal at the time — and the series responded with a harrowing and masterfully constructed episode that gave us a strong sense of what it must have been like to have been there when the accident occurred. Last year, “Deadliest Catch” devoted a full hour to the death of one of its major characters, Captain Phil Harris. There are countless other examples of unscripted TV shows either integrating shocking real-life developments into their narratives or stopping the narrative entirely in order to address them. And the show’s producers were all over the place, issuing statements, doing interviews and talking about what happened as frankly as they could.

To put it mildly, that didn’t happen on “Real Housewives.” The series talked around the event, then pushed it into the background.

And it probably goes without saying that the program never turned the camera on itself. There was zero acknowledgment that what we’re seeing isn’t a documentary, or even a zoological curiosity like the original reality series “An American Family,” but a hybrid documentary-drama in which events are contrived and manipulated to create conflict and give the editors colorful footage to futz around with.

At no point did “Real Housewives” pull back the curtain and let us look around backstage and see reality rather than “reality.” Maybe such an approach is beyond the series’ intellectual or imaginative power. Maybe they’re saving it for a sweeps month special. Or maybe everyone involved in the series is so lawyered up right now that we should consider that tepid opening sequence a miraculous departure from the show’s norm.  In any case, it would appear that early reports of a “special” about the suicide were greatly exaggerated.

When Kyle said life must go on, I think she meant the show.

“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.’”

Building on recent articles by me and “Reality Blurred” editor Andy Dehnart, Holmes proposes that the producers and networks who air unscripted TV shows agree to do the following things:

1. Provide participants with up to three months of after care and counseling when the shooting stops;

2. Publish the performer’s contracts on the show’s website where the public can scrutinize them;

3. Agree not to  air any footage of drunk participants if the show’s producers are the ones that provided them with alcohol (if the participants got drunk on their own private stash, this rule does not apply);

4. Guarantee participants “six hours of uninterrupted sleep at least five nights out of every calendar week”;

5. Cut out any footage of minors, unless they appear “incidentally” in a scene;

6. “Limit isolation,” and give participants who are cut off from loved ones the chance to speak to a designated friend or family member for 10 minutes each week;

7. Give participants free medical care for any injury or illness that occurs during filming;

8. Not apply “gag rules” to participants after shooting;

9. Not obligate participants to take part in follow-up shows;

10. Give participants who think a series has misrepresented or slandered them the chance to go through mediation with an impartial panel.

Shows that abided by this code of ethics would be marked with the unscripted television equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. “If a certain number of viewers decide they’re going to favor code-compliant shows and a certain number of advertisers decide they’re only going to advertise on code-compliant shows, some of those costs would be offset,” she writes. “It will ultimately be the responsibility of viewers and advertisers, in other words, to shop for ethical television the same way they might shop for ethically produced goods of any other kind, and to provide the financial incentives.”

This is just a bullet-point summary of Holmes’ proposed code of ethics; she gets into much more detail, so I recommend reading the whole article here.

Of course the very idea of reality show producers and their networks abiding by an ethics code is laughable on its face. Humans can be astoundlingly greedy and stubborn, and nobody who’s making money hand over fist, as the people who created some of these series absolutely are, is inclined to accept even tiny restrictions on their business, unless the courts, the marketplace or some legislative panel leaves them no choice.

So this is all a pipe dream — at least until the Armstrong family sues Bravo, as it has publicly threatened to do, or until some other parties who think some other program caused them suffering wrangles concessions as part of a settlement.