I was completely with the reality TV boom for a while. I really liked a lot of the reality TV, and the one that lost me was the ballroom dancing one they do, 'Dancing with the Stars.' That was the one where I watched it and I was perplexed. I thought it was really boring.
There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies.
I hate these reality TV shows where people walk off Big Brother and think they're A-list celebrities when they've done nothing in their lives, it really does my head in.
I've never seen the Osbournes, I've never seen Paris Hilton. I'd rather read than watch reality TV. I'd rather live life than watch somebody else living it.
When my TV show, 'Sports Jobs with Junior Seau,' assigned me to be a 'Sports Illustrated' reporter for a weekend, I didn't realize I'd have to squeeze it in around another sports job. I had planned to retire from the NFL to enjoy the cushy lifestyle of a full-time reality TV star, but I wound up getting run over by a bull.
Reality TV rots people's brains.
Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.
I've said no to 'Celebrity Big Brother,' 'Strictly,' and the American one, 'Dancing With The Stars.' I don't feel it's right for me. I've been asked to do reality TV a zillion times. No way. No way. Nobody's going to get into my living room and see me there.
In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.
I preferred MTV as it used to be when it was about the music - I don't like it that now they just have reality shows. Reality TV rots people's brains.