GOD DOESN'T MAKE CARS CRASH, AND YOU KNOW IT: Kathryn Joosten has become its a H!ITG! of high level on TV recently, with roles on The West Wing, Joan of Arcadia, Desperate Housewives, with a well-deserved Emmy award. The beloved Mrs. Landingham gets a profile in today's L.A. Daily News briefly discussing how she first got into acting, and that her first acting gig was at Disney World.

WE ACCEPT THE REALITY OF THE WORLD WITH WHICH WE ARE PRESENTED: While none of us may be living like Truman Burbank, mistaking a giant stage set for our everyday world, we do inhabit a culture in which "reality" and "entertainment" are no longer mutually exclusive categories. In studies like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Neal Gabler's Life: The Movie (1998), cultural critics and historians argue that turn-of-the-millennium America has become what Postman calls the "Age of Show Business," an era in which, as Gabler puts it, "entertainment has conquered reality."

Both Postman and Gabler see TV news programs as the earliest and best (or worst) examples of reality turning into entertainment. In the 1970s, local news stations battling for ratings developed the audience-grabbing formats of "happy talk" and "action news." Network news introduced magazine shows like 20/20 (1978) and Dateline (1992), packaging "serious" stories with music, graphics, and dramatic narration. During the 1980s, TV also began treating entertainment as news, as Entertainment Tonight and Hard Copy drove the engine of tabloid television and took celebrity gossip to a whole new level. Finally, with the emergence of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, viewers could enjoy wall-to-wall coverage of real-life crises -- what Frank Rich dubbed "mediathons" -- complete with theme songs, logos, and an entertaining cast of characters.

Parallel to this entertainmentizing of reality came the realitizing of entertainment, especially via reality TV. Beginning in the 1970s, hosts of daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey found enormous success by focusing less on celebrities and experts and more on ordinary people, both as guests and in the studio audience (a trend that would take a turn to the absurd in the '90s with Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael). Another strand of reality programming featured what David Letterman would call "Silly Human Tricks": Real People (1979), That's Incredible! (1980), and especially America's Funniest Home Videos (1990), truly one of the most influential TV shows of the past generation for its message that every moment of viewers' lives was potential "entertainment." From there, it wasn't that big a step to The Real World (1992) and Survivor (2000), in which "real people" become "cast members," taking on "roles" and acting out "plots" for viewers' enjoyment.

Obviously, this blog's readers lurve their well-crafted reality TV shows, and plenty of critics, both professional and amateur, agree. But is there a cultural cost to our obsession with reality-based entertainment (and entertainment-based reality)? How has the reality boom changed our definition of popular culture -- indeed, our definitions of both "reality" and "entertainment"?

Next week: video games, multiple-arc TV shows, the Internet, and other topics addressed in Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You. Feel free to follow along at home.

THE GOOD HOUSEKEEPING SEAL OF APPROVAL MAY CARRY LESS WEIGHT THAN INITIALLY BELIEVED: Back in those heady early decades of universal refrigeration and newly less-back-breakingly-onerous housewifery, our foremothers really knew how to dazzle with a pat of butter and some canned soup. This site captures the heyday of terrible food in all its glory. Ten PM Cookery is a good one, not to mention this display of things that should never be suspended in jello.

(thanks to my neighbor for passing this one along)

10 > DEATHLY HALLOWS > 100: The NYT list of the ten best books of 2007 is out, as is its list of 100 notable books from the year. Given how few of these I have read so far, I will almost certainly need to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, which made the Top 100 list.

RED, WHITE, AND GOLD: Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor a writers' strike will stop High School Musical 3 from starting shooting in January. Interestingly, while the script is apparently done, songs are still being written, which seems to me not to be a particularly good way to write a musical, at least one that integrates the plot into the songs. Any bets on a release date? I'm thinking Thanksgiving 2008, same slot as Disney hit with Enchanted, since the late summer date used for HSM2 is probably too tight a turnaround.

THE STRIKE IS OVER, YOU WERE WITH ME ALL THE WHILE: After what I suspect will turn out to be a deeply painful if not crippling 19-day shutdown of the Great White Way, the Broadway stagehands' union has reached an agreement with the League of American Theaters and Producers. Feel free to read up on the terms -- changes in minimum staffing for load-ins, timing of the continuity call, and so forth -- if you like, but as far as I'm concerned, the important detail is that I get to go see The Farnsworth Invention this weekend.

So go see a Broadway show -- and while you're at it, go eat at one of the theater district restaurants that have taken a monumental beating over the last few weeks.

A MODEL'S PORTFOLIO IS SECOND IN IMPORTANCE ONLY TO HER ABILITY TO READ CHINESE STREET SIGNS: I'm too lazy to check, but I do believe that a few weeks ago I warned of the danger of an ANTM contestant's arc peaking too soon. Since this show should really be called Tyra's Chicken Soup for the Tall Anorexic's Soul (and don't think too hard about that title because it will blow your mind), if you learn your heartwarming lesson from Tyra too soon, or if you suffer a relapse, you're going to be sent packing, literally. Advice to future contestants: Tyra will cure you of bitchiness/arrogance/lack of personality/autism in due course; don't try to rush things, okay? Incidentally, wasn't Tyra's comment that the bottom two this week take the best pictures but have trouble communicating just an admission that she cares more about good television than about good models?

Two things to add to the Immutable Laws of Top Model (along with "there is always an Ebony, and she is always a bitch"): the first two talking heads are the bottom two, and the prize for being in the bottom two three weeks in a row is a ticket to sequesterville.