Reality TV encourages and rewards vulgar, selfish, antisocial, pissy-pants behavior. Ever since “Puck” put MTV’s Real World on the map with his nose-picking, homophobic, rebel-without-a-clue posturings and earned notoriety as the first contestant to be evicted from the premises, self-centered jerkhood has put reality’s lab rats on the publicity fast track. On Bravo’s Shear Genius, Tabatha Coffey, doing a sawed-off version of Cruella De Vil, gloated with nasty delight after being eliminated from the show in a team challenge, because she was able to take a despised rival down with her; she exuded such Schadenfreude that she made losing look like sweet victory, a sacrifice worth making to louse up someone else’s chances. And what was the fallout from her unsporting, cold-dish behavior? Why, she received her own Bravo show—Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, where she got to be a bossy boots, bestowing her bad attitude on the less fortunate. TLC’s Jon & Kate plus Eight was a popular, wholesome family favorite, but it was a tacky act of alleged infidelity that turned the marital split of Jon and Kate Gosselin into a nova express, their uncivil war splashed across checkout-magazine covers as America took sides, choosing between Jon, the philandering dope with the dazed expression, and Kate, the castrator with the choppy Posh Spice hair. We are now stuck with them for the foreseeable future, just as we are saddled with MTV’s The Hills’ Spencer Pratt, who has just brought out a book—which is probably one more than he’s ever actually read—in which he caddishly boasts about his bastardly behavior toward Lauren Conrad, exulting in the wet hisses he and his wife, Heidi Montag, receive as America’s least-admired bobbleheads. From the New York Daily News: “He brags in the book that he made a point of telling every blog around that a sex tape of nemesis [and former Hills star] Lauren Conrad existed. Why? Because he could. He … says he wouldn’t have personally attacked Conrad had she not been so darn nasty to his then-girlfriend Montag.” He’s now thumping his chest in triumph at having helped drive Conrad off the show. “‘If I weren’t me, I’d hate me,’ he announces.” I hate him and I’ve never even seen The Hills, which only testifies to Reality TV’s phenomenal outreach, its ability to annoy even the uninitiated.

The ego maneuvers of a Tabatha or Spencer are minor-league Machiavelli compared with the latest scar on Reality TV’s record—the savage murder of former bikini model Jasmine Fiore, whose mutilated body was jammed into a trunk and discovered in a Dumpster. The chief suspect was her former husband, a reality star named Ryan Alexander Jenkins, whose paltry claim to fame was his having been a contestant on the VH1 reality show Megan Wants a Millionaire, that ample contribution to humanity. (The Megan in want of a millionaire is Megan Hauserman, a graduate of VH1’s Rock of Love: Charm School, who aspires to the title of “trophy wife.”) “The case cast an unsettling light on the casting practices of reality television, in particular the sometimes tawdry shows broadcast by VH1,” reported Brian Stelter, in a New York Times story headlined, with a delicate understatement bordering on self-parody, killing raises new reality tv concerns. Proper vetting would have revealed that Jenkins had been previously convicted of assault against a woman and would perhaps have disqualified him from appearing on Megan Wants a Millionaire and I Love Money 3 (also VH1). Nine days after Fiore’s disappearance, Jenkins was found hanging dead in a motel room, his suicide completing the circle of misery, brutality, and fame-grubbing futility. In his final caper novel, Get Real, the late Donald Westlake had his woebegone protagonist Dortmunder and his gang cast in a Reality TV series that would have them plotting and executing a heist as a camera crew tagged along, borderline accomplices in crime. An ingenious story line, but Get Real may have been outdone and then some by the Brazilian series Canal Livre, whose host, Wallace Souza, is alleged to have commissioned a fistful of murders to bump off rivals in the drug trade and to ensure that his cameras would be the first on the scene for the buzzard feast (arriving so promptly that gun smoke was still streaming from one victim’s body). Ordering a hit and then dining out on the corpse—talk about controlling supply and demand at both ends!

Reality TV gives voyeurism a dirty name. For film directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Andy Warhol to Brian De Palma to Sam Peckinpah (whose last film, The Osterman Weekend, was set in a house rigged with closed-circuit TV) to Michael Haneke (Caché), voyeurism has been one of the great self-reflexive themes in postwar cinema, James Stewart with his zoom lens in Rear Window being the primary stand-in for us, the audience, spying at life through a long-range gaze. In thrillers, the idle viewer becomes implicated, ensnared, in the drama unfolding and discovers that voyeurism is a two-way mirror: Raymond Burr, the watched, glares across the courtyard and meets Stewart’s binocular gaze—contact. In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer’s passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.

James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.