A Simple Death

Mary Ellis Bunim, who almost single-handedly dragged television to unfathomable lows by ushering in the era of “reality” TV, has died at the age of 57. The creator of MTV’s The Real World and the film The Real Cancun, her most recent offense was the use of the even less interesting Paris Hilton footage on the Fox crapfest The Simple Life. But while she was content to edit the lives of others, her own final days were done with the camera’s red light off. Her own death story could have mirrored the amazingly prescient 1980 German movie Deathwatch, where Harvey Keitel followed a dying woman to film her last days for a television program. In that film, as in Bunim’s own life, they learn too late that some things just don’t belong on television.