Tuning In to A Realm of Reality Where It Never Sinks In

Throughout the first episode of "Living Lohan," which debuted last week on E! Entertainment, Dina Lohan -- mother of Lindsay, the actress, singer and alleged coat thief -- explains that the only reason she has invited an entire production crew into her Long Island home is to let people know that she is just another single mother trying to do right by her kids. She is normal. Normal! And if it takes eight episodes of reality television to prove it, then let's get on with it.

Dina Lohan and her cohorts in the now overpopulated Reality-ville have sprung from a culture in which selling one's privacy and dignity to the devil counts as both rational and routine.

Her show's focus is meant to be 14-year-old daughter Ali's budding career, but the subtext is Mommy Lohan's war on tabloids and bloggers who won't allow her to have fame on her own terms. She is an obsessive Googler -- on the hunt for the latest bit of trash talk about carousing Lindsay -- even as she preps another daughter for the celebrity mill.

You admire her willingness to talk tough to the music honchos in her role as Ali's protective manager. But when she stares transfixed at a blurry online sex photo that may or may not be Lindsay, you can't help but wonder whether she's agitated because her daughter's privacy has been violated or because it's so blurry that a proper attention-grabbing scandal can't ensue.

Ali is hungry for success. She looks up to big sister Lindsay. She tries to dress like her. She wants to follow in her footsteps, although hopefully not the ones that led to rehab. Ali aspires to be a singer, although there's no clear indication in the first episode that she can actually carry a tune. She and her mother join forces with Jeremy-the-music-producer, who's described as a family friend. But he comes across as so sketchy that it's no surprise when Mommy Lohan discovers Internet gossip that links him to Lindsay and that appears to have been generated by Jeremy himself.

Also on E! during the summer TV dead zone is "Denise Richards: It's Complicated," a reality show about the dogs, cats, pigs and blind dates in Richards's life. For those unfamiliar with Richards's curriculum vitae, it includes: playing a Bond girl, rattling boy libidos in the swimming pool scene with Neve Campbell in "Wild Things," touring various talk shows as the aggrieved ex-Mrs. Charlie Sheen and helping to keep tabloids afloat due, in no small part, to rumors that she stole her good friend Heather Locklear's husband, Richie Sambora.

While Richards's life might be complicated -- she has two toddler daughters, her widowed father lives with her and she seems intent on making the same relationship mistakes over and over -- the premise of the show seems quite simple: Exploit personal life for financial gain. And if the debut episode is any indication, the leitmotif of the summer series appears to be . . . the penis.

In the double plotline of Episode 1, Richards is set up by her friend Trish on a disastrous blind date, after which the audience learns that Richards likes her men edgy and well endowed. She also keeps busy with her pet pig, which she is trying to breed and for which she has purchased a stud piglet. In a scene that could be some sort of petting zoo porn, we learn that pigs are exceptionally tenacious and well hung. This curious but worthless bit of information has undoubtedly affixed itself to the brain cell where we once housed the Pythagorean theorem.

There is no need to waste precious time rendering a nuanced judgment of these shows. Of course they are bad. They are hellacious. Awful. Dumb. You don't feel smug or smart after watching them. You feel vaguely inebriated: loopy, dazed and guilty. Which is why, when E! is repeating them for the umpteenth time on a rainy Saturday afternoon or in the wee hours of the morning, we will watch them mindlessly as we shovel chips into our mouth.

How do these shows come to exist? Are we really connected to these bubbling swamps of narcissism and scandal-mongering? How far is each of us away from our own reality show? Probably just a few thousand dollars and a promise that we'll get our soul back with residuals.

Reason tells you that it makes no sense to star in a reality show that exploits the dark corners of your life in order to persuade the tabloids to stop writing about the dark corners of your life. But the decision to welcome the cameras isn't surprising. We have become an exhibitionist culture. "Living Lohan" and "It's Complicated" are two in a long line of extreme examples of the same illogic that has people screeching intimate details about their love life into a cellphone on a street corner only to look around in indignation when passersby stare, eavesdrop or dare to shush them. People plaster their Facebook and MySpace pages with embarrassing photos of themselves in the midst of drunken debauchery, only to be stunned and embarrassed when strangers, co-workers and bosses look at those photos, link to them and make judgments based on them.

We live excessively public lives and yet somehow expect our escapades to remain private -- or at least unremarked on.

A good deal of the tabloid mischief that follows the Lohan family seems self-generated. A good deal of it also seems too ridiculous to even warrant attention. But Dina Lohan keeps smacking her head against the same wall and wondering why she has a headache. Only little brother Cody, 11, seems to recognize that the road Ali and his mother are taking is an absurdly familiar one. When he sees his mother on the tabloid warpath yet again, he asks: "Why do you have to read them?" The answer seems to be because if she didn't, there wouldn't be a television show.