PALO ALTO, Calif. — We are shocked, shocked, shocked!
By now, someone in your industry should have coined a descriptive word to describe the media trend that has spawned shows like “Dog Eat Dog,” “When Animals Attack Bachelors,” “Who Wants to Extract Alimony From a Multimillionaire?” and “Overstuffed!: The Exploding Gourmands of New Orleans.”
The network to ride this trend to popularity was “Shock” Murdoch’s Fox. The perfect word for this process is therefore found by a quick appeal to Latinate roots — the “vulpinization” of television. We feel this word is far more useful than other possible but unwieldy candidates such as “lowest-common-denominatorism,” “proletariatization,” and “rubbernecktheatreification.”
Vulpinization. We urge you to use this word whenever possible. Add it to your spell-check dictionary. We did.
— Caitlin and Michael Shirts
