Being Lara Bingle ... "a series that combines irredeemable vacuousness with faux documentary realism." The genesis of this series is pure plastic: it is a copy of an American faux reality series, Laguna Beach, with a dash of the grotesquery of another American reality show, Jersey Shore, and the dramatic story line of yet another American show, The O.C. This Australian knock-off draws its drama by fixating on several carefully chosen young women who represent the quintessence of puerile narcissism. They are the only people who don't get the joke - that they are the joke - cast for their combination of vanity, vapidity and plastic surgery. The real Shire must be getting sick of parodies, which began 20 years ago with the ABC documentary Sylvania Waters and reached a height of communal defamation after the Cronulla riots in 2005. At that time the people of the Shire were wrongly caricatured as racist, insular and whitebread by a news media too lazy to get the real story, which was that the people of the Shire were right to be angry about the systematic sexual harassment of young women at Cronulla beach, which had been going on for years while the police did nothing. Exhibit two: MasterChef. Here is a show I enjoy, but what I like about the show, the talented contestants, does not obscure what I dislike about the show, its relentless mixing of advertising, cross-promotion, product placement and self-aggrandisement.

If you were to add to the advertising all the in-show plugs for Coles, Qantas, Western Star Butter, MasterChef magazine and a host of other products, plus those irritating advertising crawls along the bottom of the screen, MasterChef would easily exceed the limit of paid advertising allowed under Australian broadcasting law. In fact, there is so much product placement and so many plugs that MasterChef, in its entirety, could be classified as advertorial. This, plus the antics of the co-host George Calombaris and the bullying of the contestants, who are forced to work under absurd deadlines in order to satiate the producers' need for drama and manic energy and avoid the trap-door of public elimination. Exhibit three: Being Lara Bingle. Here is a series that combines irredeemable vacuousness with faux documentary realism. It is supposed to be reality TV but everything is for the cameras and nothing is really real. In the entire series there was not a single idea or a single reference to anything wider than Lara's apparently incurable self-absorption. The series was kicked off with a public relations concoction, in which Ms Bingle was caught naked, ''unawares'', while at her full-length front window. No one ever went broke on Australian TV going for the lowest common denominator, but this series was knowingly built entirely on falsity and voyeurism. It is some justice that the cynicism at Ten, the blurring of ethical boundaries, has not been rewarded on the bottom line. The share price of Ten Network Holdings is currently 50¢. A little more than two years ago it was $1.54. The company's market value has thus fallen by two-thirds in two years, shedding well over $1 billion in the process.

The person technically responsible for what is evolving at Ten Network is the managing director, James Warburton, but he joined the company only in January (from Seven) when all the current trends were already in place or in the pipeline. So the primary responsibility would flow to Ten's chief programming officer, David Mott, who has been in charge of the network's programming for 15 years. If the regulator were interested, I think Ten has a case to answer. Follow the National Times on Twitter