Even Better than the Real Thing

"Fourteen years ago, in my book 'Life: The Movie,' I wrote about a growing phenomenon in America in which life itself was being transformed into an entertainment medium, often usurping more traditional entertainment media. I attributed this to many things, perhaps chief of which was the extent to which we had lived so long in a nimbus of constant entertainment, where music, television, novels and especially movies had infiltrated our imaginations, that these became the matrices for our lives and the bars for the heights of our expectations.
"Whether it was a matter of us just becoming too jaded with our mundane reality or too hyped by fictions, we had come to demand more of life. We wanted reality to measure up. Maybe we even wanted reality to challenge the artifices of traditional entertainments—artifices like scripts and stars."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times explores how people fall for scandalous sports stars.