Ah Rowan, once again you have made me feel o.k. again. When I was growing up The Three Stooges were all the rage I didn't like them then and even less today. I did like Laurel and Hardy and in particular a movie called "Freedonia" with the Marx bros.

I am also puzzled by all the "Judge" shows, where the audience cheers at the end of each verdict after the "Judge" berates people for their behavior. Judge Judy is probably the most paternalistic, and condensending.

All of these shows do more to foster stereotypes, create hate and make no real contribution to any issue, I find them all very troubling, however since they make money, at least in our society, all is forgiven.

Oh Yeah! The "Judge" shows. There is certainly a theme here. From the response I have gotten from others, I feel that I must be outside some group - or just missing something. Most somehow find them entertaining.

The other baffling change is the mixture of cartoon and movies - or turning cartoons into movies. I have to wonder if that is tied to the absence of reading in this society. Now there are some incredibly complex cartoons, and anime is (frequently) a whole different genre. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. In this regard though, I think the industry is moving towards replacing actors with computerized characters - much more profit that way.

Several guesses here.

-I've read that people will watch anything that's put on TV in the right time slot. The frame of mind that leads to this behavior, and how it's produced, are another question which might be worth going into.

-Insofar as we need a motive to explain people's watching reality TV, though, my guess is that you have the motives right, though I would put them in the other order. First, desire to watch other people suffer and embarrass themselves. The main point of this is probably that it makes one's own life seem closer to being okay, so a widespread appetite for this kind of thing says something bad about the happiness rate in our country. I have noted a much milder form of the same thing as being very prevalent in sitcoms too--they often seem to feature people proceeding with social interaction under some grotesque misapprehension or misinterpretation, or laboring to maintain a deception which we know is eventually going to fall like a house of cards. And I wonder how much of the appeal of the Roman gladiator and animal fights lay in comparing one's own situation favorably to those of the participants.

-Voyeurism--the appeal of watching other people from an invisible position, and more broadly of having the "inside scoop" or secret information, is certainly an important influence as well. Besides shows that feature people's private lives, we have shows in which crucial facts are kept hidden from the participants while being revealed to the TV audience. I have to wonder how much of this is fake and in general how much the various reality shows are actually scripted. I think if they turned out to be heavily scripted their popularity would drop significantly.

-The "five minutes" thing, on the other hand, helps to explain why people are willing to be ON reality TV shows. Although if I wanted to get fame by embarrassing myself publicly, I would want to do it on my own terms and wouldn't need lying TV producers. Just recently I was reminded of COOL "DISCO" DAN who got modestly famous by the simple expedient of spray-painting his name on hundreds of surfaces all over Washington, DC.

-About the thing of making movies out of old cartoons (and old TV shows etc.), I don't know...I've been seeing it as a desperate barrel-scraping exercise, and also an instance of the usual cross-marketing thing of using any available scrap of "brand recognition" or "brand loyalty" to attract people to your product...

I have this to offer. People in this society are so stressed out with their own lives. Between work, home and family, there is no real time to take care of ourselves. Many end up on anti depressants; many find other ways to escape the stress, but escaping reality is quite the challenge.
Perhaps these shows are appealing to drain the brain of all critical thought, or to find a way to say "See, my life is not so bad," Or "See, I am not so crazy afterall."
I personally do not find these shows at all amusing or entertaining. But I do find other shows useful in the "brain drain" I mentioned above. Tetris got boring, so now shows like "Law and Order" and "CSI" consume some of my brain power. Even with that option, the anti depressants have not disappeared...

Another thought more along a political perspective...
Who in government wants the "People" to think critically and make good decisions? Who in government wants people to think that they might have to learn to survive 'in the wild' so to speak when the oil is gone? The participants in some of these shows are viewed as completely insane, or addicted to danger. More stereotype training, eh?