Susan Boyle, the star of the U.K. edition of Britain's Got Talent is recovering from the ordeal of her appearance on the show.
The BBC has a flock of pop-psychologists interpreting her fate and TV executives have sought to pre-empt regulation by calling for more rigorous "psych testing" of participants in reality programmes.
This is all very interesting but misses the point, either by design, accident or willful ignorance.
The point is that the media features people like Susan Boyle because they are vulnerable. They're cast because they are extreme and unstable, because in their vulnerability and madness rests talent - and a compelling one at that.
Problem is that once the likes of Susan Boyle, Britney Spears, Kerry Kantona or Paul Gascoigne start to crack, their fate fast becomes, in the words of journalist Jenny McCartney
a prolonged pageant of self-destruction that draws the crowds, like a potential suicide teetering on a balcony.
One way in which the media promotes and embellishes the narrative is by editorializing - giving an opinion that masquerades as objectivity.
But there's another, more posh, deceptive way via eyewitness-style, wannabe 'literary journalism', something that television - and especially British television - loves: voyeuristic journalism cast as high class art, rather than - in the words of Tom Wolfe
a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph of the novel.
In a recent edition of the London Sunday Times, "international interviewer" Daphne Barak reported on her experience of filming Amy Winehouse for an up-and-coming documentary. The article was republished in Grazia.
The four days Barak spent with Winehouse is cut-down in to a story of Dress Swap, illicit drinking and intimate scenes of Amy playing with children.
Winehouse plays with several young girls and, according to Barak,
it's obvious that Amy feels much more at home with these girls than she does with the grown-ups...She is childlike in her need for affection, constantly coming up to hug us.
Being told off by her father, Amy is said to look like a child who has just been sent to the naughty corner.
After Barak lends Winehouse a dress to go on stage, Amy switches into a little girl who needs approval. She is melting, hugging me over and over again and saying "You're so sweet. You're so nice..."
And the day after a performance, the femme fatale of last night is once again a little girl. She hugs me again and again. I notice at one point that she is sucking her thumb.
Now I am not guiltless in this space.
Over a decade ago, I made a mannered film with English TV presenter and writer Paula Yates that investigated the circumstances of the death of her lover, Michael Hutchence.
But the genius, ground-breaking work of the likes of Joan Didion or Norman Mailer in the 60s, 70s and 80s does seem today to have given way to a deluge of authored aperçus on human nature by journalists and filmmakers.
The prevailing influence of therapy in culture and of vulnerability as a defining feature of 'personhood' seems to allow more and more observers to become analysts.
And a will to typecast a human now turns fast in to the hot pursuit of jeopardy.
So it's a nice idea to introduce more rigorous "psych testing" of TV contestants.
And it's comforting to acknowledge that fame induces undue stress.
But psychodrama is entertainment.
And poor souls like Susan Boyle are its medium.
