French people think Americans are crazy, and we are supposed to be the cultural exception, she told the Washington Post. What a pickle. Over the past month, the trash TV that millions of French people have wanted to see has been Loft Story. If you remember Big Brother on CBS last summer, the Loft Story concept will sound awfully familiar. The French program features a group of twentysomethings living in a large apartment and being monitored by twenty-six cameras and fifty microphones.
Residents are to be voted out, one by one, until two remain.
Loft Story has fallen victim to the usual analytical excess and rhetorical overkill from French critics. One deep thinker blasted the show s intrusive maternal voyeurism, another declared that it might lead to rampant fascism, while a third, not to be outdone, found it guilty of totalitarianism. If it s crudity the French are looking for, there are plenty of American shows that, as far as I m concerned, they can have. Steven Bochco s NYPD Blue, for example. This season, the ABC drama, apparently bored by mere bare buttocks and desperately striving to be cutting-edge, has resorted to brief shots of a severed penis and a woman s pubic hair.