As crack TV's popularity spreads, so does the dueling punditry over whether it's a brilliant new form of spectacle — the Coliseum updated for the 21st century — or the entertainment equivalent of the Ebola virus…

In one corner are hip academics, already scribbling scholarly essays proclaiming brilliance — the way Camille Paglia did about Madonna in the '80s. "Dramalities," they say, are satiating people's needs for sanitized gossip, Peeping Tomism, and the pathetic desire to feel superior. The programs' unrehearsed moments are like visual jazz, appealing to the near-universal desire to be on TV in a country where there is no greater achievement. …

In the opposite corner are those who decry the phenomenon as the fulfillment of Edward R. Murrow's dark prophecy: "This instrument [television] can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box."

[Survivor] is "Gilligan's Island" meets "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" meets "Lord of the Flies," with an emphasis on the primitive behavior of the novel. The show's producer, Mark Burnett, says that while "Survivor" has the trappings of a game show, it is "mostly a psychological story." He says he thinks of the "Survivor" genre as "dramality" because it's "drama meets reality" (and not, of course, because of the pun on "malady").