Voting for Strangers

Bebe Generation was one of those mid-2000s things that felt inevitable—stick some attractive young people in shared apartments, let viewers vote on who joins, offer prizes to people who participate. I probably would’ve watched it. The whole premise was utterly transparent about what it was: just the spectacle of watching other people’s lives, nothing more, nothing less. You got to vote, you might win a digicam, that was the deal. There was something almost respectable about that honesty, before reality television got anxious about its own existence and started insisting its spectacles actually meant something.