In television, as in life from time to time, routine bites hard, ambitions are low, and resentment rides high.
It seems sometimes as if every new show is a desperate attempt to suck the dry husk of everything that has gone before.
In North America, the medium has pushed up from the US, stopped briefly in Canada for Trailer Park Boys, then north to Alaska in an attempt to satiate its voracious appetite.
Now Alaska has become cool; why?
(Yes, yes, geography, I know.)
It probably started with Northern Exposure.
Recently, we've had Klondike, Ice Road Truckers and Gold Rush, as drama and reality television, from the state hits our screens.
Now we have Alaskan Bush People.
They come from deep in the vast Alaskan wilderness, Billy Brown, his wife Ami and their seven grown-up children.
They are, apparently, so far from civilisation they often go six to nine months of the year without seeing an outsider (though not in 2012, because a television crew was following their every move, day in, day out).
Also, the Alaska Dispatch News has reported the property the show was filmed on sits on a subdivision less than 10 miles south of Copper Center (population 328), easily accessible from a dirt road just off the highway.
There's a pizza place about half a mile away.
But never mind all that.
The Browns also have a car with a trailer they drive on well-maintained roads.
But never mind all that.
The show, set to start on Discovery on September 16, introduces what must be the most heavily armed reality television family to appear in recent weeks.
''They may look normal, but the Browns are unlike any family in America,'' we are told.
''They've never been in an elevator or on a roller coaster.''
Oh, the shame.
Anyway, they are moving further north, though there can be no point far enough north for this show.
Fortunately, BBC Knowledge is running a show about space: a place where there are no bush people, ignorant masses, or trailer parks.
The Truth About Voyager is a documentary about the little spacecraft that could.
Voyager (actually there's two of them) is/are about to leave the solar system an incredible 35 years since it/they left Earth.
The Truth About Voyager (August 27, 8.30pm) tells the story of what the mission has achieved so far, and what happens next.
The Voyagers (one and two) were sent to explore the outer planets of the solar system: Saturn; Jupiter; Neptune and Uranus (oh, stop it).
And the documentary on their flight - and the data they sent back - is fascinating.
It says something about real reality, as opposed to the other sort.
- Charles Loughrey
