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Influential poet and social critic Gil Scott-Heron died Friday afternoon, reportedly after falling ill following a trip to Europe. Scott-Heron is best known as a powerful voice of black culture, but his influence extends across color lines. His arguably most famous work, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, was a prescient media critique whose title credo has embedded itself in the American cultural vocabulary. My favorite Scott-Heron piece, though, is the even more prescient health care-and-taxes rant Whitey on the Moon.

I’ve been reading and re-reading the story of the “crashers” and all of the related stories about Reality TV, and something just isn’t right. While the couple is described as auditioning for a Bravo TV series, and Bravo goes out of their way to say that, there won’t be final casting decision for “months”. But in my experience, t Shat just isn’t how Reality TV works.

First, a bit of history.