The patients (and this is where things become a bit too easy) are celebrities playing themselves, not Kate Winslet-level celebrities, but the fallen ones who might seem unfamiliar even to viewers of reality TV.
Southern California's Orange County is known to viewers of reality television as the quintessentially upper-middle-class, suburban, mostly white, Christian and Republican enclave where class, social strictures and the pressure to "marry well" still pervade — it is, in other words, a world not so different from Lily Bart's.
Mr. Robot, a show known for bending viewers' perception of reality, is going deeper by simulcasting an immersive short film presented by Chris Milk's virtual reality company, Within later this week.
Excessive crime coverage, he added, gives viewers a warped view of reality, making them distrustful, fearful of society, and dulled to violence.
But while Mr. Nichols employs a handful of tried-and-true (and therefore always persuasive) shock effects to blur the viewer's sense of reality, there is something at stake beyond formal cleverness.
Like other youngish French filmmakers — François Ozon, for example, who has also made use of Ms. Rampling's chilly, enigmatic charm — Mr. Moll likes to tease the boundary between the ghost story and the psychological thriller and to throw the viewer's sense of reality off balance.
Producers were concerned that the anti-gay slur could be deemed derogatory by viewers of the reality TV show.
Prominent bumper bars can push disabled vehicles and spin out fleeing suspects using the P.I.T. (pursuit immobilization technique) maneuver familiar to late-night viewers of police reality shows.
As viewers of the reality TV competition to crown "America's Next Drag Superstar" are well aware, in episode 4 contestants recorded and shot RuPaul music video parodies.
It's a serious illusion that flatters the serious intentions of his serious viewers — a simulacrum of reality that's neither real nor symbolic, and that shears off the divergent complexities of daily life and inner life, of identity and society and politics.
