How-to and Reality TV for the downturn

The viewpoint that companies need to create jobs these days is, on the one hand, based in the hard, cold reality of nasty times and tight-fisted banks, but it is equally underscored by a cynical belief that people don't know how to create value bottom up.  That a substantial portion of the population is so deracinated, disempowered and undereducated that all they can do is get and learn jobs of limited complexity. I, for one, am not so down on the capacity of working folk as to think they can't learn how to grow into new roles and responsibilities.  Just think how creative otherwise unexceptional people can get with narcotics production and distribution.

How is it, then, that these same people who were so educable in the ways of complex consumption in the preceding decades cannot be shown how to start and run businesses.  Which is to say that, for every "This Old House," "Punk My Ride," "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", "Home Makeover", cooking and endless flavors of shows that tought us how to consume things in a complicated way, that equally compelling TV couldn't be created around producing value.  Imagine Click and Clack doing "Start-up Talk," Bob Vila doing "This New Start-Up," a reality show which brought us the trials and tribulations of a Quiznos.  It wouldn't necessarily be great, but so much TV isn't.  If you get charismatic people in front of the camera, and, for the lower grade ones, good-looking people in their 20s with strategic piercings and enhanced physiologies, there could be a lot of passable and cheap to produce TV.