By Diane Vadino
Special to MSN TV

It wasn't that long ago when reality television was a novelty, and comparisons to "The Running Man" (first a book by Stephen King, then a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) featured as a leitmotif in the early days of its critical coverage. "The Running Man" told the story of Ben Richards, a contestant on a game show in the America of 2025: Richards is pursued by assassins and awarded prizes for every hour he manages to stay alive. (Think "Wipeout" with guns.) This dystopian future, pundits kvetched, might be our own, a futuristic twist on our hardwired affection for watching people hurt one another. Would ratings, critics wondered, eventually trump common sense? Would people get hurt -- and would we tune in to watch when they did?

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Of course the answer is yes. This is not always done in a distasteful manner. Take, for example, "Deadliest Catch," which earned some of its highest ratings with the multi-episode arc sharing the sad, final days of Capt. Phil Harris, felled by a stroke. The tone was respectful, if not reverent, and the images of the once-gruff Harris, so vulnerable in his hospital bed, must have encouraged some viewers to seriously examine their own lifestyle choices. (It's extremely effective as an anti-smoking PSA.) More common, though, is our piqued attention when things go horribly wrong: when someone punches Snooki, when whatever Ron and Sammi share looks more like domestic abuse than a functioning relationship. We watch repeat viewings of "Real Housewives" not to see Caroline mother Albie and Christopher as much as we do to see Teresa flip a table or Ashley rip Danielle's hair from her head. In the shorthand storytelling the genre requires, we're clued in early and often on whom to cheer for and whom to root against. We wait for the big fall on "Dancing With the Stars" or the massive heartbreak on "The Bachelor." It's compelling because it feels real (whether it is or isn't) -- and it's not happening to us. As a programming philosophy, schadenfreude ("making me feel glad that I'm not you," as memorably defined by "Avenue Q") has proved difficult to beat.

It remains to be seen if our collective fascination with injury has a limit. One test will be the ratings that greet the debut of the second season of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" on Monday night. We expected more drunken blowups between Kim and Kyle; what we'll get is yet to be known, probably even to producers, who recently began a hasty edit of their season. When Russell Armstrong, husband of "Beverly Hills" star Taylor, killed himself on Aug. 15, he was one of the most prominent but far from the first star of a reality television series to take his own life. Similar fates have befallen participants on reality shows like "The Bachelorette" (former contestant Julien Hug, who appeared on Jillian Harris' season, shot himself) and "Extreme Makeover" (Kellie McGee killed herself after making critical comments about her sister's appearance; her sister never appeared on the show.)

What's clear is that in the binary world of reality TV, Russell believed he would look like the villain in his relationship with Taylor. This is easy to see, since it's the same role he "played" -- or "lived" -- last season. There's an efficiency to the storytelling that would be impressive if it weren't so cruel: This is a show about housewives, which mandates that Taylor must be good and Russell bad. A show about husbands might have painted Russell as solid and ambitious, and Taylor as flighty and cold. Character shading, in either case, would have required too much time and too many resources.

Immediately following Armstrong's death, rumors circulated about his financial health and his sexuality, as if to say: He did it to himself, by making bad investments and keeping secrets from his wife, and he could have come to the same, sad end without ever appearing on Bravo. Maybe, but it seems more likely that the intense spotlight was a torment. It's also true that "Housewives" stars are under no insignificant pressure to present themselves as powerful and glamorous, or risk losing airtime, and the costs associated with this could break anyone's bank -- or spirit, or marriage. Theirs would not have been a franchise first: Vicki Gunvalson of "Orange County" told CNN in April, "Six years ago, when [ex] Donn and I started, we didn't have 90 percent of the problems that we have now, and I truly believe it's the show."

Armstrong's death occurred in the wake of the year's other big news from the "Housewives" universe. Former "New York City" star Bethenny Frankel, who escaped the batty New York collective to her own show as soon as possible, sold her Skinnygirl Margarita for a reported $100 million. Frankel was the outlier in the debut crop of New York women -- not a housewife, even, but a single woman who dedicated most of her time to hawking her diet philosophy on-air wherever she could. In that first season, Frankel offered a master class in how to star in a reality show: Control the agenda (she was always selling Skinnygirl, not herself), own the skeletons in your closet (by telling us about her tumultuous childhood, she didn't have to worry they'd come out later) and get out while the getting is good. Russell Armstrong didn't follow those rules. He often seemed to be faintly incredulous that he was on the show at all. Frankel won the lottery, Armstrong lost, and millions of us would fight to take the chance. It might not be "The Running Man" yet, but we're closer -- and who wants to bet Monday's ratings for "Beverly Hills" are its best ever?

The season premiere of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" airs Monday, Sept. 5, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo.

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