It was tolerable, at least, this explosion in celebrity gossip, when it was primarily an Internet thing. With new venom and none of the old-school sugarcoating, sites such as TMZ and Perez Hilton prattled on about who was gay and closeted, who had a new mug shot taken and why.
We could dip into or out of the celebrity chronicles as we chose, though it was impossible not to bump into them during a day of even work-related Internet activity.
Now the best-known gossip sites are slipping beyond the digital domain and into the broader, bigger realm of TV.
, the otherwise tacky outfit that has broken stories including the one about Mel Gibson being a couple of drinks away from raving anti-Semitism, now has “TMZ on TV,” fresh every weeknight on the screen that doesn’t involve your mouse. Perez Hilton, star of his own exuberant, shamelessly juvenile gossip blog, is the star of a new VH1 show called “What Perez Sez About …” Now that the gossip eruption has oozed over into TV, it is time to rein in our salacious instincts and at least try to say, “enough.”
Enough with encouraging the dominant attitude that says, “You are famous, and so you have relinquished all right to reasonable treatment. You will be stalked, preferably with a video camera. You will be hounded until you get ticked off enough to bark back, and then you will be mocked for your lack of restraint.”
It may make even the most star- crazed among us queasy at times, but the stars, for their fame, have sacrificed the right to complain, says Mario Lavandeira, the sometime actor better known as Perez Hilton.
“My position is that if you are a politician or a celebrity, you’re making a choice to live your life in the public arena, and when you’re a public figure, you need to be prepared for the public talking about you,” he says.
Surprisingly, he’s almost charming in the TV show. Basic-cable standards won’t let him indulge his most base instincts.
TMZ, on the other hand, gets nastier on TV, in part because it often has scant news to report and has to fill its daily half-hours with old footage and what its staffers think is cutting commentary.
The show ends up being just another variation on the rampant celebrity worship that got us into this mess in the first place, a vocation so lucrative it’s sucking in even the seemingly unwilling.
“This is not my bag. I am a lawyer. I did investigative reporting,” says Harvey Levin, the former TV producer (“Celebrity Justice”) who started TMZ for AOL Time Warner and Telepictures Productions. He stars in “TMZ on TV” as sort of the show’s guiding intellectual force. This involves saying, “I love it,” when told of some new naked-person footage that the site’s minions have scared up.
But he can’t quite muster a defense of what TMZ does. Ask him why TMZ, which stands for the “Thirty-Mile Zone” around Hollywood, is important or necessary, and you get something close to a Miss Teen South Carolina stammer.
“It is interesting, and I think kind of important for people to talk about,” he says. “People are interested in celebrities who are interesting.”
We may never nudge trashy gossip back to sidelong glances in the checkout line, but we can at least try to make the pleasure people take in it a lot more guilty.
