Reality TV or Surreal Life?

Could Reality TV be just another oxymoron…like jumbo shrimp? I saw a show about the Monkees on the Bio Channel last week that left me a little dazed and confused. Here you have 4 guys that auditioned so that they could act on a TV show that portrayed them as a real band, like the Beatles or the Kinks. In reality, they were just 4 actors pretending to be real musicians. But then something happened. Under the mutinous leadership of their own Michael Nesmith, the boys broke away from the “machine” that created them, and began to record and produce their own music. Whoa, kind of like “watch Frankenstein come to life in the warmth and safety of your own home,’ don’t you think? So they basically broke free, lost their appeal, and then were cast off into a musical abyss, not to be embraced again as a real group except through TV reruns a’ la Nick at Night. I ask you, was their reality just good television for our collective entertainment, or is true reality TV something we create from the depths of our own imagination? Does life copy art? Is reality merely our perception of what could be, only if? Can you say “Ronald Reagan?”